Mythbusting India's Mars Mission
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Of course the material cost of the rocket stages and probes/satellites is quite small, the vast majority of money spent on space exploration is spent on earth. Paying earth engineers earth dollars that they will in turn spend on earth. That 25 Billion USD Apollo program? That money didn't get sent to the Moon, damn near all of that money was spent in America.
Hell, think of it this way: India needs satellites, so they can either dump money into another country that will build and launch those satellites for India, or they can dump that money back into India and develop those capabilities themselves. How could you possibly fault India for keeping their space money domestic?
There's an argument that it's the best possible thing they could be doing, or that India's space program is extremely cost effective, etc. But an expenditure is a loss not a gain--otherwise we could make ourselves rich by breaking all the windows in the world.
It is not about, if the US space program was better/worse than the Indian one. But that we don't know the alternative outcome of a lot of smart people working, not on the space program, but on many different fields that could lead to a greater outcome than this one project (the work would be less visible to the public than one shiny big project but in the end there is (in my opinion) more gain for the people, because the market responds generally better to the needs of people than a bureaucracy)
Money is not equal wealth. You can spend money in a circle of two people a thousand times, that doesn't make the two richer. Or you can add 0's at the end of all bills, that doesn't make anyone more rich either.
I think it's more reasonable if we focus on wealth and not on money in this discussion.
Well, I didn't say that it is, I just argued that it wasn't a negative thing. Wealth was not destroyed or sent away to some far off land, just shuffled around within the same country.
I will say that it is now though: One of India's greatest assets is their production of quality engineers and scientists. The more money they can dump into engineering and scientific endeavors, the better. Unlike breaking windows and then replacing them with identical windows, programs such as these actually create something: experience and expertise.
In evoking the broken windows parable, you are mistaking a rocket for a window. Space programs do not destroy wealth to move money around. Perhaps if we senselessly knocked down a few buildings every time we built a rocket, you might have a point; space programs aren't "cash for clunkers", we aren't destroying wealth (old cars) to encourage the exchange of money (buying new cars).
The wealth is not the money, it's the spacecraft.
The return may well be worth the cost, but it's wrong to say that wealth was simply moved around within India. Money was moved around within India. Wealth was concentrated into a small package and then blasted into space, never to be seen again.
The wealth, or money, represented by the physical spacecraft is a rounding error. The thing isn't made of gold bullion. Wealth was used to develop and exercise engineering talent. Wealth was converted into talent, not a spacecraft. Those engineers were not sent to mars, some largely inconsequential piece of metal was. The wealth remains on earth, in India.
If I spend money to take a bunch of CS classes at community college, then at the end of that do `rm -rf ~/files/school/cs`, did I just delete wealth? Of course not. The wealth was not concentrated into that directory, it was not lost or destroyed when I sent it off into oblivion.
Exactly. Because you were well-trained to protect yourself with aliases.
Now if you'd done '\rm <etc.>', it would be another story.
The directory of source code created during my education is not something that wealth was poured into. Wealth was poured into my brain, that directory is just a byproduct. If I, and all of those engineers, technicians, and scientists, gave ourselves brain-damage, then and only then would all of that wealth be destroyed.
If I deleted that directory I would think "Welp, that was [x]-hours of time well spent," which is where it derives it's value* not from the money I spent on my education.
*That is, of course, if you ascribe to the labor theory of value.
The fact that you persist in confusing money with wealth makes me think you haven't really understood my point. Gold is not all that useful by itself, so launching a bunch of gold into space would not be throwing wealth away the way launching an expensive and fancy satellite is.
A Mars mission is not undergrad CS work. It's a serious project. If we deleted all copies of the Linux kernel from the world, have you destroyed wealth? Of course you have.
There's apartments in NYC/London that cost more than that.
I really wish that, just once, I could criticize a bad argument without everyone thinking that I support the opposing view.
What could you get in the equivalent of $72 million?
A holly wood movie? Series A funding for yet-another-photo-sharing start up? Opening ceremony for Olympic games?
Things like the Mars mission has profound implications on the very survival of human race over the next 1000 years.
The only thing I wanted to provide is that there are, actually, useful, measurably beneficial things one could do for „just” 72 megadollars — like a „boring” school, or a clinic. Or a stretch of a road and a clean well, maybe even a small stretch of railway. In many places those would be huge.
This doesn’t mean a space program is the best place to take money away from — not even in India, and definitely not in the United States. I just mean it’s not money one can wave away as small change.
Again, I am not singling you out, I get what you're saying, but I just have to ask: why aren't we having people pointing out how many schools can be built out of a budget for, for example as kamaal wrote, an Olympic opening ceremony? I don't think it's even some kind of closet racism, as some have argued, in general (though in this case there is also that, in this story's coverage by the Western media), because people go nuts over the US space program also. Even outside the US. :) It's a clear pattern of pushing the waste argument over just about any kind of space exploration anyone does, and it's not done just by "unwashed masses" but also by very educated people (e.g. here, I had a colleague, a theoretical physicist of all people, telling me how space programs are such a waste when there are people starving etc...). What the hell?
Mind you, I do think that a lot of complaints about this specific mission are of a racist nature - but that's because I suspect that many of the detractors wouldn't critique US space programs the same way.
> The cost of satellites and rocket launches would tend to disagree. They are not cheap.
The cost of the material of hardware is a miniscule proportion of that compared to the investment of time of engineers etc. involved in the project, and ground based hardware that can be reused for other missions. That engineering time could have been used on something else, sure. But the time spent is not wasted: It increases the experience and thus value of those engineers for the future.
It's already a mission on a shoestring budget, but the bit that they actually threw away never to see again was much, much smaller.
Yes, the time spent by the engineers has long-term benefits in increasing their experience. However, a large portion of that time is lost to the spacecraft. If that time could have been spent more productively elsewhere, then spending it on this was a bad idea.
Again, I'm not saying that the mission actually was a bad idea. I'm simply saying that "the money stays in the economy" is a terrible argument.
At the point of launch the satellite would be even less valuable (in the use value sense, which is what you're referring to) than a bunch of gold. At least gold could be put to some use (it is a useful metal), while a satellite's only useful purpose is to be launched into and operate in space. It's why a satellite exists, you would lose wealth only if it wasn't launched.
Let me repeat that.
Wealth is not money.
One more time.
Wealth is not money.
Now, if you'd care to try your comment again with that in mind....
Also notice the part where I explicitly mentioned that if the money earned is never spent on good or services than the wealth is destroyed. Maybe try working on your reading comprehension before you decide to be a dick?
Really? What about the expertise gained? The knowledge gained?
Space exploration is vital for long-term survival of a country like India.
Why, why, why must people assume I'm being blindly antagonistic? I just don't get it. You quote me and then reply as if I said something stupid, and "correct" me by saying something I agree with and never contradicted.
No wealth was shot in to space, or literally negligible amounts of it. The wealth is the know-how, and expertise that can replicate such a mission again. Which exists in tact on earth.
One of the goals of the mars mission is - to develop the technologies required for design, planning, management and operations of an interplanetary mission.
In other words, this is just the beginning.
From -
http://www.isro.org/pslv-c25/mission-objective.aspx
The 'other wealth' you talk about is pocket change, in comparison to any public project.
So a writer could write a sci-fi novel about mars and sell that to a ready audience.
An entrepreneur could create models of the planets and sell those to schools.
A movie maker could make a new movie with a space theme.
Not to mention actual technical innovations that could come out of new knowledge gained. Moreover, kids could be motivated to take up science and engineering for future jobs in 'STEM' fields. If this unlocks the imagination of even a few creative people, they could put back more than $100m of wealth into the economy.
Why do you assume Mars has zero wealth? Over the long term, this "loss" of wealth will result in helping humans (not just Indians) harness that wealth in Mars and other places.
That is a trivially vacuous statement. Everything has an expenditure. It is the net benefit that counts. Even breathing takes energy.
But ultimately that money could have built a big dam, or a few beautiful bridges, or a small power plant in a country with lots of power outages.
I personally think it is money well spent, because it heralds the arrival of India to the world of first class satellite launching, by doing something Russia failed at the first few attempts. But that payoff is over the long term.
The reason the IRSO is able to accomplish so much is because it is so efficient and damn good at what it does. The reason why other agencies and organizations in India have such a hard time keeping bridges safe or the lights on is because they are massively inefficient in comparison. These other programs, given the IRSOs budget, would have accomplished approximately "fuck all" more than they did without it. The IRSO should not be punished for the failings of other aspects of the Indian government.
Why can't they be in parallel?
And this is some what unfair to the people at ISRO. India spends a great deal of money on infrastructure too, bulk of that money is either stolen brazenly or sunk to corruption.
From another perspective... I often look up at the night sky and think to myself: how many civilizations are gone, simply because they failed to have the vision to leave their home planet?
A great line from a t-shirt:
"Asteroids... are nature's way of asking: 'How's that space program coming along?'"
a) communication latency b) addicted to information and c) instantaneous species-wide communication.
and how those are greater risk factors?
You can observe this by how easy it is to fall into the trap of thinking that destroying the money would be a huge waste. It wouldn't. Money, by itself, has no value. It's only useful in how you can use it to obtain goods and services. Destroying money reduces your own ability to obtain goods and services, but doesn't actually destroy wealth, as everyone else's ability to obtain goods and services increases to compensate. While wealth is typically measured in money, wealth consists of goods and services.
The fact that the money recirculates in the economy is irrelevant to the question of waste. If they wasted the money, it essentially means that the goods and services purchased with it were squandered.
So, forget the money for a moment. Analyze it like this: a bunch of engineers and technicians spent thousands or millions of collective hours. High quality aluminum, steel, electronics, etc., were used. And the result is a spacecraft. That time and those resources could be used to do something else. Perhaps something better, like build schools or factories.
That is the argument being made. I'm not saying it's necessarily correct (this mission doesn't seem like it's very expensive in the grand scheme of things, and the benefits for science, technology, and just plain prestige seem well worth it) but it is at least sensible in its foundations.
Factories and schools are not failing to be built because of a deficient in engineering talent caused by the IRSO.
Then the people that criticize space exploration based on similar arguments would be stupid to do that. In the long run (which may not be that long after all) we do need to get off this planet in order to survive as a species. This is just a fact, is how the observable Universe works.
So next time someone ask this - the proper reply is - where is the cancer research infrastructure and promising leads which could absorb what we spend every year on smartphones and tablets.
I agree that this is probably a net gain. But you can't demonstrate that by saying that the money keeps moving within the economy, and you especially can't demonstrate that by holding up destruction of cash as some sort of worst-case scenario for waste.
Beyond the "is there necessary infrastructure for alternative project X so the diverted funds aren't wasted" question, the argument for me is: that time and those resources were spent in India, by India, and the result is an increased knowledge and capacity to leverage some highly technical skills and technologies.
You don't add rocket scientists to your workforce by building schools, you do it by adding/increasing the capacity for such work. Being trained to do the work doesn't make the work to do, if that makes sense.
I definitely agree that the question of "why is X needed when the first-order benefits of Y has such a larger impact" is relevant and important, insofar as X is the space program and Y is a collection of social programs.
This is not always true. There are some areas of governance from a sovereign country's point of view which it cannot neglect and should develop indigenous capability. Areas like defense which is non-negotiable and other strategic areas like space.
A good government always tries to balance investment in different areas. If India stops investing in Defense and Space and keeps building only schools and toilets, that will be a lopsided, weak development to say the least.
Even in other non-strategic areas, societal development cannot be dictated to flow in a single direction.
Consider this for contrast:
India's top 3 high budget movies - 86 million USD [1]
Mukesh Ambani's house - 2 Billion USD [2]
India's education budget for 2013 - 11 Billion USD [3]
India's health care budget for 2013 - 6 Billion USD [4]
[1] http://www.therichest.com/luxury/most-expensive/top-10-most-...
[2] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/international-bu...
[3] http://www.livemint.com/Politics/7EmPAMBANzkPDAPuyruQ1I/Chid...
[4] http://in.finance.yahoo.com/news/budget-2013-hikes-spending-...
Edit : alignment
It does no such thing. It merely presumes that if you want to justify the mission, that is what you must compare it to, not a ridiculous scenario of taking the cash spent and burning it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
(I'm only addressing your first two paragraphs. Your third paragraph switches tact by arguing about the positive benefits of space exploration funding)
You are suggesting we weaken our foundations. A talent pool takes a lot of generations. No one can say America or some other country will do the space thingy, you go work on poor.
Mind you, these so called engineers and other workers are free independant INDIANS, who can do whatever they want, join any field they want to, work towards goal they collectively set.
There are many unproductive things, .. drugs/prostitution/trafficking has billions of $ involved each year. We would rather spend energy in making those people productive, if anything.
Decide to write novels? "That's nice, what a nice career choice." Decide to write iphone applications? "How the hell can you sit there programming iphone applications when you could be using your intellect to fight hunger!? There are more important things than iphone apps!"
Do you generally hear this sentiment from "the general public"? In my experience, it comes more from people who are disillusioned by their direct interactions with group X.
It is like they think talent in any STEM field is something that society has gives to people on the condition that they use said talent to cure cancer and solve world hunger, and anybody not using their talent to do those things is failing to hold up their end of the bargain. People with skill in the humanities seem to be largely free of this judgement.
Akbar in India, Kublai Khan of Mongolia, etc.
Anyways, nor you or I have the correct information, or any other basis enough to claim, that these engineers can be put to better use. WHo has that information? THE GOVT! So chances are that in all likeliness this is the most efficient use of that workforce.
Engineering isn't some uniquely special skill; it is one of many. Yet it uniquely is singled out as being a skill that bequeaths the holder with some extra responsibility to society. Engineers don't owe the world any more than anybody else does. (And if you think they do, then why do non-engineers not owe it to the world to become engineers?)
> "Those earth engineers could be doing other things."
I might as well point out that you could be working on a cure to cancer right now. You wouldn't buy that argument though, right?
The IRSO didn't sit on their asses twiddling their thumbs while consuming money for several years, only to have a rocket pop out of think air. They were working their asses off, developing new skill-sets and advancing their understanding of their field.
Lots of people around the world (including inside brazil) went: "Oh, brazil cannot do that stuff anyway, also why it is expending money in that shit instead of building x, or y"
It made me very sad, for example I bet most of these people don't know Brazil relies heavily on sattelites to control forest fires, find illegal logging, mining and farming, find uncontacted native americans that need protection, and so on...
In a country that is just huge, specially in relation to government resources and population, it is essential to use cheap tools to manage it, and sattelites are quite cheap in that regard (or people really think it is cheaper to fly up and down every square inch of forest with helicopters?)
Indian press was no different. There was 20 minute debate(These guys are still debating if the mission was necessary) on whether the mission was necessary. The next 2 hour prime time news was about Sachin Tendulkar's last test match.
Some channels just gave a passing reference. All that was shown is that ISRO had launched a mars mission with a 20 second clip of the rocket taking off.
There is no popular demand. The general public is not in any position to understand what the mission is or why its important. How much effort was gone into it, and how it was done.
For example, ISRO have never had a engine before that could re-ignite after a 300 days period of cryogenic conditions of space. That technology developed in extreme conditions can be reverse engineered to make our cars perform better in winters. Or some other applications. Does that sort of returns even get reported ever?
A better argument might be that a country needs to develop other industries and gain certain expertises. There's no point in having all the IIT's, if people have to leave the country to use their abilities. Space, rocketry, satellites, etc are upmarket skills.
2) the logic of your argument fails anyways - they proved to the world - that they can send a spaceship to mars - they already launch satellites for other countries - and make a shit ton of money on it - their people are learning to make spaceships that can go into deep space - an industry that if anything is also growing in the private sector - they did the whole thin for the cost of a few hundred javelin missiles that the US army has been using to kill arguably mostly civilians in Afghanistan (and dont tell me the US has money - you know the debt ceiling fight recently? That was the US agreeing to borrow more money). there is almost 0 wrong with this mission.
What?
Indian cinema gross box office for 2011 was $1.1billion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_cinema
> India is the world's largest producer of films.[23][24] In 2009, India produced a total of 2961 films on celluloid, that include 1288 feature films.[25] The provision of 100% foreign direct investment has made the Indian film market attractive for foreign enterprises such as 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures, Walt Disney Pictures[26][27] and Warner Bros..[28]
Animation is probably the logical place. It's not the quantity of films, but the quality.
Bollywood does makes some great movies, of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3_Idiots
Here's what Hollywood makes:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2012/how-much-does-hol...
It looks like they get around $10 billion US and $25-$30 billion internationally.
So, in the big scheme of things, a billion dollars is less than the Avengers made at the box office.
Companies and Industries often don't compete with other ones when there's a significant enough barrier to do so (or not to do so). There's a huge and rapidly growing market in India, why would Bollywood look elsewhere without increasing it's take of it's own market?
I posit that Hollywood better look to Bollywood for it's growth potential - the middle-class in India is growing, while the US middle class is in decline.
Anyway, if Bollywood doesn't want to think global, I'm ok with that. Someone else will seize the opportunity.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230421390...
Btw, in other threads people are debating whether it's a good idea to spend money on space research, and here we are telling them to spend money in movies instead? What gives?
Finally, it's entirely possible to create sustainable industries in aerospace. It's just not an immediate turn around.
Bulk of the IITians are busy preparing for interviews(stuffing algorithm books in their brains) at big web companies to ultimately write HTML pages. The ones left are preparing to do their MBA's at IIM's or at some foreign university. IIT's are all about brands stamps, and access to a world wide network of alumni that ensures you get fat paychecks.
Guy's at ISRO. Most of them are from small time colleges, and many with average marks and grades. Many probably don't even have an engineering degree, and probably have a diploma.
IIT's have contributed very little or almost nothing to India. Bulk of their students don't even work here. Modern India is the pretty the result of the sweat and blood of the ordinary college educated student.
>>Space, rocketry, satellites, etc are upmarket skills.
I hope more people realize this hard fact.
> IIT's have contributed very little or almost nothing to India.
I don't even know why I am biting but I guess someone has to point it out. I know it is fancy to sling mud on the IITian but last I checked (maybe a year ago), about 50% of my class went on to do higher studies. Out of that maybe half went on to obtain a PhD. A paltry 10% or so went into management. Others went for jobs...mostly in the product sector. Some did join service jobs but quit soon after and they went for a Masters too I think. About 5% of my class have started companies in India.
> Guy's at ISRO. Most of them are from small time colleges, and many with average marks and grades. Many probably don't even have an engineering degree, and probably have a diploma.
Just stop. Please. There are tiered requirements for Scientist categories. Pretty obvious if you check the newspaper ads.
> IIT's have contributed very little or almost nothing to India. Bulk of their students don't even work here. Modern India is the pretty the result of the sweat and blood of the ordinary college educated student.
Many have come back to join as faculty back in the IITs. You can pull up say IIT Elec department page and confirm yourself. A decade ago, it was our own faculty who encouraged us to step outside. Now, slowly, we are bringing in overseas culture within our own campuses.
* * *
But hey, you have already formed an opinion and composed an elegy. What I wrote above is not for you. It is for others to gather that you are factually incorrect.
Correction. That's happening from decades, not just one decade. But besides that, you do agree most of your folks don't even work or stay here.
The Indian tax payer is subsidizing the IIT's for a reason. We need to pay for the education of people who stay here and contribute(In fact that was the whole point of IIT's).
Coming to IIT's, you guys are going to settle down abroad anyways and you will also get fat paychecks. Why should you need any kind of subsidy. I am sure most banks would be more than willing to lend a education loan.
So it's less than the price of a cup of coffee really.
It's also, coincidentally a Mars reference :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Capsule_Recovery_Experime...
SRE-1 was launched and landed in Jan 2007. It was a small sat with aeroshell and parachute for reentry, with water splashdown.
Reentry has been done by: NASA, ESA, Russia, India, China, Japan, and SpaceX. Reentry is mostly for manned spaceflight, which was the driver behind the SRE mission. ISRO has ambitions in this direction, though the manned program seems to be on the back burner now.
(There are other uses for re-entry: planetary exploration and sample return, mostly. But getting to other planets or getting samples from somewhere interesting tends to be pretty hard. Older spy sats used to re-enter their data payloads, but that's not needed anymore.)
I think ISRO gets an unfair treatment when they take up such forward-looking projects.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Capsule_Recovery_Experime...
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISRO_Orbital_Vehicle
[3]http://newindianexpress.com/nation/Manned-expedition-hopes-r...
I'm sure once they have eliminated all poverty in their country, like the US, and then worked out the whole remote killing thing, they can continue on trying to do "Science" and "Advancing the state of human knowledge".
You jest, but space is the new way to show off your nation's military prowess. It not-so-subtly shows competency with ICBM technology. North Korea did just that when they attempted to display their latest ICBM tech to the world by "launching a satellite into space" a few years ago.
A lot of people seem to be overlooking the military applications here. India has a shaky relationship with Pakistan and (like it or not) space superiority will become the next "air superiority" militarily in the coming decade or 2.
Also, it seems incredibly short sighted not to see how development of a sophisticated space programme won't benefit the people of a nation (certainly if the engineers and policy makers were prescient they could just invest their time building only the space devices that would directly benefit their people but the real world of engineering is too complex for things to work that way).
It's fortunate HN is full of people that mostly see the benefits, but it's clear a lot of people elsewhere aren't that thrilled. I for one am glad India made this step. If a bunch of people are going to demonstrate what can only be described as overt jealousy, maybe it will spurn their own nations into greater efforts in the space arena.
-Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science
I hope that the United States will learn from and one day catch up to India in terms of higher education.
The fact is that the tradeoffs between important endeavors (like feeding the hungry and exploring the universe) are not as simple as people make out. To a certain extent there is a justification to do "useless" things even at the cost of "critical necessities". Should people stop pursuing art, music, philosophy, etc. in times of crisis? Certainly there are extremely hard times when you absolutely can't afford to do anything but concentrate on survival, but such times are rare. The world is never going to be perfect, but we can't let that stop us from making the world better, in every way. By pursuing science and art, and so on.
Moreover, by investing in R&D and by advancing technology we frequently gain more than we spend. Consider, for example, the invention of the automobile. Originally a toy for the rich, today they help vastly increase the yield and efficiency of crops, and help to feed the poor.
Imagine where we'd be if in the year 1200 the entire world had decided that it could not in good conscience pursue advancements in science or the arts until everyone in the world was no longer in danger of going hungry. We would still be in the middle ages, and there would be very much fewer people who were well fed.
In the specific case of India, their investment in spaceflight technology is likely to bring them returns far in excess of the cost of this mission. Both in improvements to their industrial/technological base as well as in bringing new business for their growing aerospace industry.
Just to add, that investment in Space ventures is not profitable today, and hardly few people see it as a race at the moment, but if you look at what Deep Space Industries is doing in the US, you can say that this is a race itself. Which will turn highly profitable, when you can harvest resources in the future from places beyond our earth.
Additionally, Scientific discovery is not your "buy in the store" thing, that one nation can just expect technologies to pop out of thin air, if they pay the price. Its a hit and miss, since ages. During renaissance, multiple scientist lost their whole empires of wealth, for what appeared to be only small advances back then. It took 1000 failures, and cost of those failures in time and money to build a bulb. And look today. Where we are.
Well its a good thing that these critics are powerless to stop science, else India would have been still living on the preached ideals of these critics like " food to mouth" ideology.
EXAMPLE: Imagine you have certain amount of money, and you have two choices: Buy Seeds or Buy food. Yes if you are about to die, you wouldn't even wait to have this question, but, otherwise when you are just hungry constantly, you would invest your money partly in seeds as well that is, if you are aware, that constructive measures like growing crop has its risks, takes time, and has no immediate return. So, if you can just hold on until the harvest even on a shoe string budget, like ISRO has over here, the seed that grew into the grain will surely fill you beyond your current means!
May I even need to requote this? This is the best to describe space exploration to, such critics.
"One small step for man, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND"
http://www.quora.com/NASA/How-necessary-is-the-NASA-program
Read the first comment. I can't post the whole thing as HN has a limit on the comment length.
It does not talk about where else the money could have been spent, but what other types of missions ISRO should focus on.
Now I wonder if international media would have criticized such administration and if this amount of money which is equivalent to GDP of few nations would have been used to eradicate poverty.
>"India's Mars program promises to return useful engineering and scientific data for a price that puts other space agencies to shame!" Even after so many scams and corruptions around , Indian scientists are able to launch this mission at such a low cost, it's really appreciable.
http://balajiviswanathan.quora.com/Indian-Space-Mission-Pove...
Just a sample for reference which was told somewhere else, the budget for the movie Gravity was more than the budget for the Mars mission by my country.
A very good critique and explanation of why we need this mission is presented here,http://balajiviswanathan.quora.com/Indian-Space-Mission-Pove...
I think early explorers will have a stake in it, unless it comes down to a show of power, or something unlikely such as equal distribution of the new land to all citizens of all countries.