"The mission is expected to cost 3.8bn rupees (£45m; $78m)."
Wow. That's amazingly cheap!
Wow. That's amazingly cheap!
The satellite plans to do a detailed mapping of the entire lunar surface. If a web startup built an application in the lines of Google Maps using these mappings that would probably sell for more than $78 million, more than the whole cost of the Moon mission. Bit if an exaggeration but you get the point.
The downside to this is that it's also a great way of bringing lots of bullshit jobs into a district, and makes things VERY expensive.
Not surprising that India can do this cheaply - hopefully some of our private sector space companies will learn from what they're doing and improve on it.
In 1980, a 2nd world country was getting ready to assemble a launch system that would've attained launch costs as low as $600 per kg. (This would've been limited to hardened or bulk cargoes due to high G forces, but that's still awesome and damn useful!) The price of this system was only $25 million (1980.) That's a game changing technology and it's still within the reach of a group of "Silicon Valley duders."
No rich silicon valley duder is going to spend $25 million unless hes gets a return.
What is a "duder"? Is that equivalent to "Silicon Valley dudes"?
"Duder is a word of many possibilites. It can be used as a replacement for dude. It can also be used to mean someone is more dude-like than someone else (as in dude, duder, dudest.) It has also been known to be used to describe objects for which the name has been temporarily forgotten, or otherwise unknown to the user of the word. Still yet another usage is a verb which means the act of being a dude or doing dudely things."
In fact the actual spend would be lesser than $78M considering departments always over bill on construction/development costs.