India just landed on the Moon for less than it cost to make Interstellar | The Independent::undefined
Why is this even a comparison? India only went to the moon, interstellar had to go to other freaking solar systems and a black hole to make their documentary!
With humans aswell and robots!
Robots with feelings! Do you know how many consecutive milestones they nailed?
Cool.
The average income in India is 25x ish less than that of the US. If we scale the $75 million cost to land on the moon by 25 times, we get $1.8 billion. The Perseverance rover’s cost is estimated at $2.75 billion and that thing landed on Mars.
It’s incredibly impressive that India has landed on the moon on their 2nd try. Nothing should take away from that, and India should be very proud of their achievement. But geez this is a braindead article. Yes, poorer countries can pay people less do the same amount of work as someone in another country.
I respectfully disagree with you. It’s a bit misleading to compare average incomes like that. I would assume the income disparity is nowhere near as large for valuable scientists and engineers working for a national space program. In addition, you are only comparing labour costs. Some materials can be cheaper in India, but certainly not by a factor of 25 and certainly not all of them. Therefore, I wouldn’t say the article is braindead.
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Can you use metric system numbers? I don’t know what’s a crore or a lakhs
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This comparison is predicated on every part of the manufacturing process occurring in each country. As soon as India are buying parts from other countries they’re not paying India prices anymore
Some guy at NASA: “We estimate that the cost of this part should cost 1.8Million dollars. “
Some guy in India: “You know, my cousin can make that part for 35 dollars”
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Yeah but interstellar went to a black hole and back
Aside from different approaches I think the biggest factor is salary difference. Still impressive though a good example for other Asian nations.
Modern US space projects are also basically welfare programs for aerospace companies.
Can we not have the hundred identical stupid jokes in the comment section like we did in reddit?
It’s a human thing not a Reddit thing
How dare people have fun
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Let’s also get rid of complete transcription of short videos while we’re at it. Everyone else saw the video, no need to quote every part
Transcription is usually something done for deaf people. Like people transcribing memes for the blind.
That’s not what I’m talking about. On most of the video subreddits, the whole comment section is just quotes and laughing emojis.
Bollywood should start filming on-site.
Nah. The bad CGI is what makes it so so good
But consider the low gravity dances!
I prefer Interstellar.
Overrated movie. I’ll take real science and progress any day over imaginary nonsense that’ll never happen.
A world with only “real” science and progress but without any entertainment would be quite boring.
And fiction has been key to inspiring the next generation of scientists/engineers. So many NASA people have claimed to be inspired by Star Trek just to pick one.
Hey, but I managed to write software to calibrate µCT-scanners! That is clearly way more inspiring than all this fictional stuff. Right! Right. Right?
You bet your bippy that’s inspiring! An un-calibrated scanner just doesn’t hit the same way.
Based on the way specialized code is used, your calibration software will still be in use when they open the first scanning facility on the Moon.
Hope you accounted for the Y10K problem!
Thing is that AI can help. My SO worked in a firm that does skill extraction from CVs and job ads. They do really cool stuff to match job ads with CVs using EU skill tags! It’s a really good tool to do specific things, so I really hate all the latest articles about LLMs.
I do find myself ignoring this kind of article, too, usually. I really enjoy discovering a totally new domain where the technology is implemented in a totally new way, going well beyond language applications even.
I dream of a ‘language’ model that specializes in general machine to machine communication. It almost surely exists already, but in my line of work, machine interfacing is an endless nightmare. A ‘protocol droid’ would be such a help.
The black hole simulation for interstellar resulted in 3 highly regarded scientific papers.
Some houses cost less than Indian space agency spent on getting to the Moon? That must be a typo right?
Yes and it’s incredibly annoying to me. More. Some houses cost more than Indian space agency spent on getting to the moon.
I mean, it’s still a valid sentence. Some houses do cost less. We’re just defining the word some so loosely it’s almost insulting.
But Interstellar had a box office of $715 million.
The astronautics is a very expensive sector but with completely uncertain returns on earnings.
