This mission called 'Mars Orbiter Mission' (abbreviated MOM) is also the cheapest mars mission costing only about $78 Million. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, was present at ISRO headquarters at the time they announced success and in the speech he gave at that time, he not only praised the scientists involved in this mission but he also insisted that we should celebrate this success nationally.
And Indians were never been so obedient to its prime minister. Pages and pages of newspapers, hours of news broadcasting, trends on social media, whatsapp messages saying "proud to be Indian", Indians left no stone unturned in celebrating ISRO's success. The problem is that they haven't quite understood what to celebrate.
Indian mars mission being cheapest is not something that should be celebrated. One of the clear reasons of this is that scientists in India get paid significantly less than their western counterparts. Scientists in India don't get the recognition they deserve. That is mainly because all the research that takes place in India is funded by the government. And that of course puts limitations on how much fundings scientists and universities will receive.
Our mission being the cheapest is also a clear sign of how uninterested we are in space exploration. If ISRO had received lots of funding and then they had decided to make missions cheap in order to do more of them, it would've been a different case. But thats not happening. As Reuters report- ISRO has completed only 17 missions since 2012 and would seemingly fall short of its goal of sending 58 during 2012-17. They refused to comment on why the number is so low, but it wouldn't take a genius to know why- Because India isn't as much enthusiastic about investing money into space exploration as the west. Indians are enthusiastic about research but when it comes to doing it and investing in it they just back off. Instead of asking people to celebrate, if Modi had asked the country to make small donations for the ISRO, millions could've been raised by the whole country. He could've encouraged students to join research. He could've done a lot more than asking country to celebrate.
To be fair, Being cheap is not just the quality of this mission, all of the ISRO missions are. Few years early, ISRO sent total of 15 satellites in an orbit around earth using a single PSLV(Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle) making it clear to the world that there's no difference between our trains and rockets.
The second thing that's being celebrated is that India is the first country to make a successful mars mission on it's first attempt. This fact is somewhat misinterpreted. Soviet union made lots of attempts at sending a mars mission that failed. NASA however successfully sent a fly-by mars probe Mariner 4 in 1965 on it's second attempt, first one suffering a launch failure. NASA's first orbiter mission which is the type of Mangalyan, was also unsuccessful due to launch failure, But second gained success in 1972. European Space Agency's Mars explorer orbiter has been successfully orbiting mars since 2004, which was it's first interplanetary mission, but the second part of mission, which was a lander was unsuccessful. Chinese space agency and JAXA also made a few failed attempt. Since Europe is not a country, the honor of being the first country to send a successful mars mission on it's first attempt goes to India. And celebrating that is immature, because other agencies didn't fail because mars mission was something lot hard, don't take it wrong, of course it is harder than sending a craft on moon, but they mainly failed because of launch failures, meaning that their rockets wasn't perfect. India had developed PSLV which is best in it's class and has a very good record with a low failure rate. There were things that could go wrong after the launch but it wasn't the big task, NASA did it in 1972. That's more than 40 years before us. NASA sent man on the moon back in 1969. India hasn't even sent man in space yet. That's why Rather than trying to tell everybody how great we are that we made it to the mars in money less than the budget of "Gravity", Modi could've told people how far back we are lagging and how much more we need to catch up.
Indians always 'overcelebrate' things. Cricket and our Mars mission are at the top of these overcelebrated things. That's because we are so much behind. We are nowhere in sports and hardly manage few medals at Olympics that's why when we win a cricket cup, we feel like we are the best sports nation in the whole world. We did almost nothing in field of mathematics and physics thats why we feel that our ancestors were the fathers of mathematics for we inventing decimal system. And now that we have sent a orbiter on mars that got successful on it's first attempt we will feel that we are the MOMs of space exploration. It will be better for us if we stop kidding ourselves, understand the fact that we stand nowhere and try to change that. We should minimize our celebrations and maximize our output!
PS: this is an article you should read-
Why Did India’s Mars Mission Cost So Little?
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