Comment Re:Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (Score 1) 173
Why begrudge ISRO their moment in the spotlight?
Nobody is begrudging them their moment in the spotlight - only attempting to counterbalance and correct the hype and hyperbole that so many people (like you) are spinning.
For what it is worth, I do agree with you. I think most hype surrounding these kind of accomplishments are over the top. My only point was - SpaceX etc got far more hype for doing far less. And that is what I meant - let us not begrudge ISRO.
If you are going to say that SpaceX redefined the commercial aspect of rocketry, then ISRO too has set some new benchmarks. If you are going to argue that cost of manpower is cheap in India (hence launch costs are low) - that also ignores some crucial facts.
Cheap wages in India ensures that most of the bright talent in India routinely migrates to US universities and US organizations like NASA. It is ridiculously hard to keep good talent in the current day and age... especially if you can only pay them a fifth of what they can easily get elsewhere.
Secondly, cheap wages are only a small part of lauch costs. This is not some software they are building. I am not an expert, but I would imagine that most of the cost (most of the 75 million dollars) went into engineering, materials, and high tech parts. And material cost, especially for high end exotic stuff that goes into rockets - costs the same worldwide, including India.
At best, you can say launch cost by virtue of being in India could be, say, 50%-75% of what it would cost in US. But $75 million is a tenth of what it costs NASA. So something else was also a factor. Probably frugality in all design choices, probably even cutting corners. Mind you though, an inter-planetary launch is not a joke, and doing it successfully in the first try, despite cutting corners, is quite a feat.
It is worth understanding what ISRO did differently - what corners they cut without compromising reliability, what design philosophy they adopted - that enabled them to pull this off at this budget. I honestly think that attributing all of this to cheap labor wage is to simplistic an argument.