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Comment by tiagod | Hacker News Reader

Impressive feat. Got nervous when they couldn't contact the device, but turns out they did made history.

I might be wrong, but from my research it seem like they did this with $118 million paid by NASA. India did it with around $74 million, for reference.

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Given how much the cost difference typically is between India and the U.S., doing it in the U.S. at only a 50% premium is pretty impressive IMO. Wages alone are so much higher here that I would've expected a larger price tag.

There are differences. From the article it sounds like the falcon took a week to get to the moon. India’s mission took a month.

Second the payload is much bigger.

I don’t think cost comparisons in this case is accurate considering something bigger was delivered faster.

Exactly payload size has a lot to do with it. People are making silly surface comparisons

The Guardian writes $118 million from NASA plus $130 million in private funds.

> Nasa contributed $118m to get it off the ground, with Intuitive Machines funding a further $130m

That's to be expected, a dollar in India goes much further than a dollar in the US. https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p... says a dollar in India can buy you about 23 times as much stuff as that same dollar could in the US, although I'd expect that number to drop significantly for highly technical projects like a moon landing.

It's 23 rupees to a dollar at PPP. The exchange rate is 82, so a dollar goes 3.5 times further in India not 23 :)

Well, they spent 248M and India spent 74M. 74 * 3.5 == 259M so that tracks

Price difference applies only to wages and other non-portable costs. The prices for products and commodities which can be easily moved are roughly equal on global markets due to arbitrage. You can't get the raw materials or computer chips any cheaper in India.

> and other non-portable costs

OK, but there are a lot of these.

$74m surely?

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-india-moon-landing-cost-...

The post you're replying to is just pointing out that the quoted amount (they THEY were replying to) is missing the "million" abbreviation on the end.

So it looks like the original claim was India did it for US$74.00. ;)

They are extremely resourceful people.

Just proves why off shoring is so cost effective /s

It really depends on the rocket’s cultural fit.

I heard they did it for $3.50

No, you're thinking of a Scottish entity; we're talking about India.

Pretty sure it was about tree fiddy.

Reminds me of that South Park episode where they go to Mexican counterpart to NASA and get quoted $200 to haul something to the moon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K_1jqgCjxA&t=40s

Yes, of course. Corrected

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