I set an alarm for 4am this morning. On a Tuesday. For a rocket launch happening on the other side of the planet that basically nobody in my timezone was talking about.
India's space agency, ISRO, launched its first Mars mission today, the Mars Orbiter Mission, which everyone's already calling Mangalyaan, "Mars craft" in Hindi. Liftoff was 2:38pm India time from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre on Sriharikota island, which by my math came out to around 4:08am here. I watched it on a shaky livestream feed with a cup of coffee that hadn't finished brewing yet, half convinced the launch would scrub and I'd have wasted the alarm for nothing.
It didn't scrub. The PSLV-XL rocket went up clean, and as of tonight the probe is in an elliptical parking orbit around Earth, where it's going to sit for almost a month doing a series of engine burns to build up enough speed before it breaks free toward Mars sometime in early December. If everything goes right (and thats a genuinely big if, because getting anything to Mars is hard and most attempts by most countries have failed on the first try) it'd put India in a very short list of space agencies that have managed a Mars mission at all. Right now that list is the US, the Soviets/Russia, and the European Space Agency. Japan tried in the late 90s and didn't make it.
What I keep coming back to is the price tag. ISRO says the whole mission, spacecraft and launch and everything, is costing something like $74 million. I looked this up twice because it seemed too low to be real. For comparison, that's less than what Gravity cost to make, the Sandra Bullock movie that's still in theaters right now and is also, weirdly, about being stranded in space. A Hollywood movie about space costs more than an actual interplanetary probe. Nobody involved with Mangalyaan seems to be under the illusion this was cheap in absolute terms, but relative to what NASA or ESA typically spends on comparable missions its a fraction of the cost, and ISRO has been pretty open about the fact that a lot of that is down to lower labor costs and reusing components from other programs rather than some kind of magic.
I brought this up at lunch and got a shrug. Which, fine, I get it — it's not Twitter (everyone's obsessing over the IPO roadshow numbers this week, and I'll admit I've been checking the pricing chatter too), and it's not a new phone. It's not going to change anyone's Tuesday. But I think a country successfully sending something to another planet on its first attempt, for less than the cost of a mid-budget movie, is a bigger deal than the amount of chatter around it would suggest. It's the kind of story that's going to look enormous in hindsight if the orbiter actually makes it, and completely forgotten if it doesn't, and either way almost nobody outside the space-nerd corner of the internet is paying attention to it right now.
Small tangent, but it bugged me watching the coverage: a couple of the US outlets covering this kept describing it as India "racing" China to Mars, which is a framing I don't think holds up. China's Yinghuo-1 orbiter piggybacked on a Russian launch back in 2011 and never even left Earth orbit before the whole mission failed. There's no race happening. It's just a headline that sounds better than "country does hard space thing largely on its own timeline," and it annoys me every time I see it, because it flattens what's actually a pretty remarkable engineering story into a geopolitics story.
Anyway. The orbiter's called MOM for short, which I find charming for reasons I can't fully explain, and it's not supposed to actually arrive at Mars until next September if the trajectory and burns all go as planned. That's basically ten months from now. I've already got a note in my calendar to check back in. Ten months is a long time for a spacecraft to be quietly coasting through the solar system with nobody watching, and I sort of like that about it.