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?