AUDASE

On a Shoestring, India Sends Orbiter to Mars

By GARDINER HARRIS  NY Times

NEW DELHI — An Indian spacecraft affectionately nicknamed MOM reached Mars orbit on Wednesday, beating India’s Asian rivals to the Red Planet and outdoing the Americans, the Soviets and the Europeans in doing so on a maiden voyage and a shoestring budget.

An ebullient Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on hand at the Indian Space Research Organization’s command center in Bangalore for the early-morning event and hailed it "as a shining symbol of what we are capable of as a nation."

"The odds were stacked against us," Mr. Modi, wearing a red Nehru vest, said in a televised news conference. "When you are trying to do something that has not been attempted before, it is a leap into the unknown. And space is indeed the biggest unknown out there."

Children across India were asked to come to school by 6:45 a.m. Wednesday, well before the usual starting time, to watch the historic event on state television.

The Mars Orbiter Mission, or MOM, was intended mostly to prove that India could succeed in such a highly technical endeavor — and to beat China. As Mr. Modi and others have noted, India’s trip to Mars, at a price of $74 million, cost less than the Hollywood movie "Gravity." NASA’s almost simultaneous — and far more complex — mission to Mars cost $671 million.

Scientists and engineers of the Indian Space Research Organization celebrated after the historic event. Credit Jagadeesh Nv/European Pressphoto Agency

Success was by no means assured. Of the 51 attempts to reach Mars, only 21 have succeeded, and none on any country’s first try, Mr. Modi noted. In 2012, China tried and failed, and in 1999, Japan also failed.

But Mr. Modi, who was elected in May with a once-in-a-generation majority in Parliament, has been on something of a roll. And the Mars achievement, which he had almost nothing to do with, will only add to that.

Mr. Modi leaves Friday for New York, where he will address the United Nations General Assembly as well as a sold-out, largely Indian-American crowd at Madison Square Garden before heading to Washington for a meeting with President Obama.

The Indian Space Research Organization has always had a small budget, and for years it largely worked in international isolation after many countries cut off technological sharing programs in the wake of Indian nuclear tests. It has launched more than 50 satellites since 1975, including five foreign satellites in one June launch. As other countries have rethought their pricey space programs, India’s low-budget affair has gained increasing attention and orders.

Its success has long been seen as a fulfillment of the kind of state-sponsored self-sufficiency that former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru cherished but that, in the main, left India impoverished.

More recently, India’s technological isolation in defense and other areas has been due in large part to the country’s restrictions on foreign investments, its poor infrastructure and its infamous bureaucracy. India is now the world’s largest importer of arms because of its inability to make its own equipment and its refusal to let foreign companies open plants owned entirely by them.

The country’s most important export is the cheap brainpower of its engineers, based in technology centers like Bangalore and Hyderabad, who provide software and back-office operations for corporations around the world.

"Our success on Mars is a crucial marketing opportunity for low-cost technological know-how, which is what we do really well," said C. Uday Bhaskar, an analyst with the Society for Policy Studies, a New Delhi research center. India’s space program "spent peanuts, and they got it done."

India’s decision to launch Mangalyaan, the name of its spacecraft, resulted after China’s own mission to Mars failed in 2012. In almost every sphere, the Chinese have outpaced the Indians over the past three decades, but Indian scientists saw an opportunity to beat them to Mars.

In just a few months, they cobbled together a mission to send a 33-pound payload of fairly simple sensors to Mars orbit. They used a small rocket, a modest 3,000-pound spacecraft and a plan to slingshot around the Earth to gain the speed needed to get there. A mission that began with a November launch in Sriharikota has been flawless ever since.

"In this Asian space race, India has won the race," Pallava Bagla, author of "Reaching for the Stars: India’s Journey to Mars and Beyond," said in an interview.

The triumph was well timed. Thousands of Indian and Chinese soldiers have been engaged in a standoff for more than a week on disputed land in Ladakh, in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, and President Xi Jinping of China recently held a three-day visit to India that was overshadowed by the border disputes.

Mangalyaan, which is the Hindi word for "Mars craft," is slated to remain in an elliptical orbit around Mars, sending back information about Martian weather and methane levels in its atmosphere to controllers in Bangalore from sensors powered by three large solar panels.