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> They'd certainly be served better with fewer (at least not ~90%) old "management"-looking people on their webcasts, which could've looked like they were made in the last five years (and less misleading people with talk of "hundreds of satellites" that in reality, IIRC, weigh just about the conventional PSLV cargo capacity[0]).

Which is why they made this video highlighting the Indian women who powered the mars mission.

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/isro-pslv-women-mars-orbi...

they are all "management looking".

You do realize that ISRO is the third space agency in the world to have a mars capable launch right ? and did it at a tenth the cost ? The only others are US, EU and Russia.

We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.

>>We have a word for this in India - jugaad. It sort of means "duct tape". And we are very proud of it.

Oh yes we are.

But Jugaad isn't exactly frugal engineering. Its more like badly put together hack.

Also frugal engineering only helps when you have specific goals and you wish to achieve only them. Larger culture of quality consciousness, innovation, precision engineering etc requires larger investments in time and money. Which is why you might eventually do a moon mission, but landing a man on moon will be that harder.

The real problem now for ISRO is mars mission and moon mission satellites are basically the advanced low hanging fruit versions of space work, not easy to pluck but if you jump a little harder you absolutely can. Anything beyond this like say landing rovers, especially big rovers will be very very hard. Or manned missions for that matter or something like a Hubble or James Webb Space Telescope, or the Voyager missions. You not only need bigger rockets, but the engineering and technology challenge there is just a whole lot degree higher. Getting to that requires building the equivalent of MIT's and Harvard's in India.

I think the USA or the western world can build the equivalent of PSLV quite easily. They just don't because there isn't much engineering challenge left in building a slightly larger ICBM. And then compete for profits there. While you can make the same money easily by selling satellite services.

Also though we should be proud of a diverse culture. Very few women are actually in any hard engineering roles there. Most are collect and report kind of jobs, or some management position, or some other desk jobs. Although that definitely counts as being a part of the project. But most of the real hard work that builds competency still sees very little involvement from women. A lot of people come in through reservations and remain dormant because of pension and other government benefits.

You do realise I'm Indian too? And that my point was that a lack of young people in the space agency, of all things, is a very bad thing? ISRO is doing good work, yes, and undercutting the ESA/NASA on price, but they're not doing unheard-of things. And others are. Jugaad can paper over a bug in course correction software or what-have-you, perhaps, but it can't create the propensity to make (metaphorical) moonshots that young people, who are not usually very risk-averse, are more likely to want. Right now, as the sibling commenter puts it, they're just hitting low-hanging fruit, and it's cheap because they have economies of scale and the comparative advantage of being able to get away with paying people less (which is not at all something bad, but it means they can do a lot more).

Anecdata: I have a friend who's wanted to work in this area for as long as I've known him (which is at least 7 or 8 years now), and he's far happier to try and find work outside India -- knowing how hard it is to find aerospace engineering work in, say, the US, with all the "weapons technology" trouble that makes gaining citizenship a requirement -- or, failing that, work at some Indian startup rather than ISRO. To be very honest, that's sad, and it's definitely not an exception. I don't see why that has to be the case: I've accepted with some resignation that math and theoretical physics/CS never will be, but space can definitely be -- for lack of a better word -- sexy. Our Lord and Savior[0] Elon Musk isn't the only one who can (or should) do it.

[0]: /s

I realize that ISRO's accomplishments are nowhere near NASA's or ESA's but to call ISRO's efforts 'jugaad' is a serious insult to the efforts and intelligence of thousands of people involved in getting a rocket to Mars.

>>"can such a poor country really afford to go into space"

Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.

This creates demand for local talent. Colleges and universities get built. Students come out with good degrees. Even if you say fail executing the the hard engineering project you end up creating a huge population of highly educated and trained people which later on go on to start companies and drive the economy.

This decision has to be made almost every single country, even more so poor nations. Because human resources development is the only way you can be a progressive healthy economy on a longer run.

>>I'm enthusiastic about ISRO being able to compete on price -- and it looks like they can go much further, considering that their labor costs are far less than they are for a private American space company, who I doubt can afford not to pay typical SF-style salaries to their engineers and designers.

ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere. The pay is not all that great compared to the best Multinational corp pays, even by Indian standards.

Another aspect is that of frugal engineering. There a lot of risky things that ISRO only does many other space agencies don't.

Eg:

They were just 18 months away from the launch date, and ISRO was only beginning to cut metal. One of the foreign partners had then asked ISRO managers: "Are you serious?"

From: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/24959866.cms

Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.

>>Maybe the first step towards making young engineers want to work at ISRO is to not, e.g. name the Mars mission, of all things, "Mars Vehicle" in Hindi?

Why not?

Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?

No, the problem isn't the language it's the name - they should name it the "Splendid Interplanetary Explorer" in Hindi, or something.

I believe they mean call it a more inspiring name - something like america's 'curiosity' or 'voyager'

Preface: I'm Indian, and I genuinely want ISRO to be the space agency: if not today, then certainly in fifty years.

> Trust me, every 'poor country' must have good science projects going. If not space projects, then at least some hard engineering ones.

Exactly my point. There was a ton of nonsense around the time of Chandrayaan about whether or not it was right to spend money on such things "when people were starving": in case it wasn't clear, I think that's bullshit. And I'm worried about it coming back, and actually doing some serious damage this time.

> Indians works on these projects if they don't name the project in their language what other language should they call it in?

As some of the other replies to your comment also point out: my problem is not the Hindi. If we launched a space telescope, I fear it'd end up named "Mahakashdoorbeen" or something. Why not something less boring than "Mars Vehicle" (which is what Mangalyaan translates to)? Remember, a 19- or 20-year-old is still young enough to be attracted to shiny things, so moralizing about how this is "useless nonconstructive criticism" doesn't help. The name doesn't increase the maximum pressure the rocket can survive, but it gets you people who can.

> Im not sure if NASA has such practices. In fact me be the exact opposite. In short ISRO makes failure cheap.

That's very interesting: it's reminiscent of Erlang, in a way. Launch a ton of cheap missions, expect some to fail, work on reducing the failure rate while not crying because a couple went up in smoke. I could see this turning into something big if they took it farther in public.

> ISRO is a government run firm, which hires Indian nationals who come out of local colleges. The kind of types no software company likes to hire, in fact you will be surprised most go for jobs there because they wouldn't have got jobs elsewhere.

Why does it need to stay that way? It seems you know more than me about how ISRO works, so this just makes me sadder.

--

It seems from the downvotes that people think I'm one of the rabid "India is a toilet" types that surface on /r/worldnews whenever there's some good news about India. I'm not: it's just I think that more Indian leadership (for lack of a better word, again) in space (and STEM more generally) is something to legitimately care and feel proud about.

>>Preface: I'm Indian, and I genuinely want ISRO to be the space agency: if not today, then certainly in fifty years.

Wanting the end without any focus on means will take us no where.

Like I said in another comment. Focus on development of human resources. Good quality and uniform standard of education for everyone without discrimination. Building high quality higher institutions of the standard of Harvard's, MIT's and Stanford's is what will prepare your next generation of citizens who will build the next space stations and space telescopes.

In short solve social and political problems first. Western perspective on India is right though. You can't have starving people, who don't have access or means to basic hygiene or sanitation, coupled with society deeply in social problems won't take you too far.

What you have at ISRO is despite these problems and initial inertial of the initiatives created by a leader like Jawaharlal Nehru. Unfortunately off late the country's politics hasn't much talent to offer to the challenges and needs of our times.

>> Focus on development of human resources.

I would like to tangentially note that NASA couldn't have done what it has done without the post-WWII Operation Paperclip, in which the USA literally stole Germany's rocket scientists.

I don't disagree, but the point is the 'stolen' scientists actually agreed to work on some top US projects at that time out of their own will.

That says something.

If the best of the world want to come to some country- You have to be doing a lot of right things to build such a ecosystem.

When the alternate is Soviet Russia labour camps no wonder German scientists where falling over them selves to surrender to UK or USA

For some reason you seem to be ashamed of your own culture. What's wrong in calling the Mars mission by its Hindi/Sanskrit name? Do China, Japan and Russia not use names from their languages for their missions? And what's wrong with old people appearing in the webcasts. They are the people behind the mission. They know the most and can inspire the best. NASA always puts their scientists (which are mostly old) in their webcasts. Do you recommend NASA do the same to attract youngsters?

See my replies downthread. It's not Hindi that I dislike, it's the choice of the name. I'm definitely on board about Hindi being a good idea for Indian spacecraft.

Calling the Mars mission "Mars Vehicle" in any language is stupid.