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India landed on the Moon for less than it cost to make Interstellar | The Independent
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Interstellar grossed over $700,000,000 at the box office. How much money will Chandrayaan-3 make?
Just showing how pointless this comparison is.
It's very hard to put a price on scientific advancement like this.
It often involves development of new technologies, talent and facilities that can generate money for decades.
The actual profit generated can be insanely large. Like the original NASA missions. They gave us so much technology. They are likely responsible for billions of future profit derived from the tech.
Consumer products like wireless headsets, LED lighting, portable cordless vacuums, freeze-dried foods, memory foam, scratch-resistant eyeglass lenses and many other familiar products have all benefited from space technology research and development. Modern laptop computers are direct descendants of The Shuttle Portable Onboard Computer (SPOC), which was developed in the early 1980s for the space shuttle program.
Worth pointing out that the scientific advancement would generate billions that NASA will only see a fraction of.
Isn't NASA funded by tax payer's dollars? I guess you can look at it as a government funded non-profit research lab that it's mission statement is to generate technological advancements for the general public's benefit.
Indeed. As they are publicly funded that money comes back in the form a taxing the profits private companies make from the technology, rather than directly into their pockets.
It's not an advancement if it's already been done multiple times, just that by other countries
But even training those personnel and building facilities can lead to more breakthroughs later. It's why it's so hard to put a price on scientific endeavours.
Well if they find water there it could make way more
Eh I can get water from my tap, I won’t buy any of that funky moon water.
I mean, if you ignore all the R&D costs up to now, including the cost of the 2 failed attempts that came before. And comparing it to house prices isn't great either, they're comparing the sale price of a house with the cost price of a rocket. It didn't cost £200M to build that house that sold for £200M.
Still though, it's a great achievement, and keeping a relatively low budget is impressive.
Why include R&D up to this point? Do we say Mars Pathfinder (Sojourner) actually cost billions because we include previous Mars missions?
I think it's just a bad article. They throw out numbers but don't say how they got them.
Article ignored all the costs up to that point.
And unlike Russia, they were successful
India landed on the moon.
Russia landed on the moon, too. They just had a few more pieces.
They were spreading their control zone
They were going for a speed record.
Any%
You could say Russian landing was more impactful and groundbreaking
Ba dum tiss
On the second try. First time their engine also over preformed putting them out of the very narrow corridor that their altimeter was expecting. But it looks like India has really overhauled and reworked the code to be much more robust this time.
Wait, Interstellar wasn't a documentary?
Well ya they went to stars that's much more far away to make that. Has no one watched the movie?
Really? I don't think so!
In absolute values, sure, but They didn't adjust for the difference in purchasing power between India and the US. Yes, the purported INR 6,150,000,000.- can be converted directly into USD 74,400,732.- using the current exchange rate of INR 82.66 for USD 1.
BUT, if you take into account the difference in purchasing power of the two economies and use a conversion rate that eliminates the differences in price levels between countries (https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-ppp.htm, 24.059 between India and US in 2022) then INR 6,150,000,000.- come out to be equal to USD 255,621,597! This value you can now compare to the production cost of movies in the US etc.
But what can you expect from those young "journalists" from the independent... they should be ashamed of themselves.
Edit: You could also take the Big mac index and compare it (https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index) and the 75 million would become about 165 million.
Yeah, people always forget that purchasing power is a very important detail when you compare currency economies either in present day or historical contexts.
Why is purchasing power relevant here? They're not talking about how much the country can afford, but how economical they are in achieving their goals.
Purchasing power refers to how much goods you can buy with your currency. As you can imagine you can buy less with 100$ in the US than in India, where everything is cheaper. If you take purchasing power into account you convert everything into a "standard amount of stuff". And using a conversion based on "the same stuff" you'll get a different currency conversion factor.
India achieves their goal still very economically, but it's not 75mil, it's 255mil. The equivalent amount of stuff that costs INR 6.15billion if you buy it in India costs USD 255million if you buy it in the US.
Oh ok, I see what you mean. People are paid less and things cost less in India, basically.
Yes, exactly.
I have worked with many Indian engineers. They keep going like a fucking train. I felt like they already knew all the about the project even before they got hired.
Have there been any people on the moon other than the Americans back in the day?
12 Americans have walked on the moon, with the last one in 1972. Four of them are still alive. Everything else has been unmanned.
Wow, walking on the Moon is deadly.
One guy did it more than anyone, but he died of a drug overdose.