So Twitter priced its IPO tonight at $26 a share, above the range they'd been floating, which apparently puts the company somewhere around $14 billion before anyone's even traded a single share tomorrow morning. My Twitter feed (ha) is already full of people doing the math on what their early-employee friends are about to be worth. I get why everyone's fixated on it. It's a good story: scrappy 140-character website turns into a public company seven years after some guys in San Francisco built it because they liked SMS. Fine. Genuinely fine.
But I want to talk about the other thing that happened this week, because I don't think it's getting nearly enough attention from anyone I read, and it's honestly the more interesting story to me by a wide margin.
On Tuesday, India launched a rocket to Mars.
I stayed up way later than I should have watching the ISRO livestream (grainy, laggy, the kind of stream where you're not sure if it's the video buffering or your own anticipation making time feel slow) as the PSLV-C25 lifted off from Sriharikota a little before 3pm India time. If the Mars Orbiter Mission actually gets there next September, India becomes the fourth space agency in the world to reach Mars, after the Soviets, the Americans, and the Europeans. Fourth. Ever. That's not a small thing.
What gets me is the budget. The whole mission (design, build, launch, the works) reportedly comes in somewhere around $74 million. People have already started joking that it cost less to send a spacecraft to another planet than it did to make the movie Gravity, which I think came in around $100 million. I don't know if that comparison is entirely fair (movies and interplanetary probes have different cost structures, obviously) but it's a funny enough coincidence that it's stuck with me all week.
Compare that to the kind of money getting thrown around in the Twitter conversation and it just puts things in a different light for me. Not that I think Twitter is a bad company or that IPOs are inherently silly (I dont think that at all) but there's something a little exhausting about how much oxygen a stock price takes up compared to, you know, a country building and flying its own interplanetary spacecraft on what is, by space-agency standards, a shoestring. I keep seeing tech blogs run the Twitter pricing as the lead story with three paragraphs, and then bury a one-line mention of the Mars launch somewhere in a roundup post, if it's mentioned at all. Priorities, I guess.
Part of it is probably just that a stock price is an easy story. Number goes up, number goes down, easy graphs, easy jokes about paper millionaires. A Mars mission takes ten months to even get anywhere, and even then the exciting part (actually inserting itself into Mars orbit) doesn't happen until next September. Nobody wants to write a story with a payoff that's ten months away when they can write about a payoff that happens tomorrow at market open.
I also think theres something a little more personal in why this one stuck with me. My uncle worked for years as an engineer on communication satellite projects back in India before I was even born, and growing up I heard a lot of stories about tight budgets and jury-rigged test equipment and making things work with what you had rather than what you wished you had. That's basically the whole ethos of this mission from what I've read — ISRO didnt build a bigger rocket, they used a smaller one they already had and got clever about the trajectory, looping the spacecraft around Earth a few times to build up speed before sending it off toward Mars. Its not the fastest way to do it. It is apparently the cheapest.
Anyway. Tomorrow the financial press is going to be wall-to-wall Twitter, opening bell, first trade, all of it, and thats a fine story for the people who care about that stuff. Im going to be checking ISRO's mission updates instead, at least for a few minutes before I get back to work. Ten months is a long time to wait to see if a spacecraft you watched leave the launch pad on a laggy livestream actually makes it to another planet, but I'm planning on paying attention the whole way.