NASA and other space enthusiasts probably were all over India's satellite Mangalyaan on Wednesday when it successfully orbited Mars -- making India the fourth nation to get there, but the first to do it on the first try.
The feat should have left all Americans with any sense of fiscal order feeling a little queasy. Why? Because the Indians accomplished their mission for about $74 million, 11 percent of the $671 million it cost us to do the same thing.
Eleven percent.
More dramatically put: ISRO, India's space agency, spent less than it cost to produce the 2013 science fiction thriller "Gravity." Far less, in fact. "Gravity" cost $100 million.
Think about that for a minute.
Granted,a direct comparison isnt really fair. Mangalyaan is a tech demo with just 33 pounds of scientific instruments on board. Our MAVEN is a full-fat NASA satellite with more than 100 pounds of scientific goodness. MAVEN is a much larger creature, too -- it had a launch mass of over 2.5 tons, to Mangalyaan's just over 1 ton meaning it needed a much larger, and more expensive, launch vehicle to get into space.
But, still.Even considering all this, wouldn't you think a trip to Mars in 2014 -- any trip -- would cost more than a motion picture or a stealth bomber or one Trident II missile? The Indians' Mars mission came in at far less. We're talking about a rocket launch, an arduous 40-million-mile journey that began Nov. 5, 2013, and equipment on board that will analyze both the atmosphere and the surface of Mars with five scientific instruments.
The Indian people are justifiably proud. They love what their space agency has done, but I can tell you, they love it a lot more because their government was careful to keep costs under control.
Oficials at the NASA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) tell me they work endlessly at cutting costs. The department employs 206 specialists who "conductaudits, reviews, and investigations of NASA programs to prevent and detect fraud, waste,abuse, and mismanagement, and assist NASA management in promoting economy, efficiency, andeffectiveness."
Now, don't get me wrong. The Defense Department has NASA beat when it comes to spending like a drunken sailor. But NASA can do more. And I just don't think a call for new cost-efficiency resolve foisted on a bloated, red-tape-entangled, federal bureaucracy is going to work without congressional oversight and a remarkable will to change. The culture of procurement overrun and look-the-other-way is too embedded.
Indias ISRO has been described as a nimble Silicon Valley startup. If that's true, then NASA is like Microsoft -- a big and lumbering giant that wants to play with the kids -- but is ultimately still a 20,000-employee agency of the U.S. government.
By the way, once upon a time during the 1990s, NASA was a leaner, meaner outfit. I remember the days on the Space Coast. The agency's portfolio of "Faster, Better, Cheaper" (FBC) missions included some truly impressive accomplishments. The best probably was the Mars Pathfnder mission in 1997. It took three years for development and cost $150 million. In the end, as the world watched in awe, we put a rover on another planet for the very first time.
Pathfinder was developed in half the time and at one-fifteenth the cost of the earlier Viking mission to Mars. And it went on to explore Mars three times longer than its project lifespan. I remember talking with the late Florida Congressman Bill Young two days after the Pathfinder landed. He told me he thought that project was the federal government's best value for money in more than a decade. He was duly proud of the cooperative effort within government to keep space program costs under control.
As I said, we need that kind of commitment and resolve again from members of Congress.
The bottom line for me is, India's Mars orbiter -- successful in every regard -- did us a favor. The lesson for NASA and for all of us is that if India can keep space exploration fiscally simple and honest, America should be able to do it, too -- and probably better. The future of the U.S. space program certainly would be more assured if we would take the accomplishment in Bangalore as a challenge to explore the frontier of a smarter, leaner space agency.
Reach Nancy Smith at nsmith@sunshinestatenews.com or at 228-282-2423. Twitter: @NancyLBSmith
