Frugality is a toxic chalice
From ‘Earth Imaging Satellite NISAR Exposes NASA’s Weaknesses, ISRO’s Strengths’, NDTV, July 26, 2025:
At the end of the day, the US scientists have swallowed their pride and are sheepishly going to watch the launch of a satellite where they have invested nearly $1.15 billion. It is this exorbitant cost by NASA that should also be a reason for Americans to squirm and be uncomfortable.
When ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission entered into orbit around Mars, The New York Times carried a cartoon showing a dhoti-clad man holding a cow in one hand and knocking with the other asking to be let into a room where he could sit with the world’s other major space powers. The paragraph above as well as many others in the NDTV article are simply the other side of the same coin: one cast ISRO as a frugal simpleton and the other takes exorbitant pride in ISRO’s frugality.
If it isn’t clear by now, however, ISRO’s lower costs stem from the fact that it’s simply underfunded and its staff underpaid. ISRO has spent less than other space agencies but how similar are the corresponding missions? The organisation’s payloads are often much lighter, carry fewer instruments, and are less capable of cutting edge science. The bigger story is that ISRO is trying (and which could be even bigger if there was a long-term plan that showed how all the smaller scale attempts added up). However, it’s not that ISRO is doing what NASA is because it simply isn’t.
There is no reason for NASA to squirm and be uncomfortable, either: the cost reflects the strength of the US dollar and the organisation of the US economy. It also accounts for NASA being responsible for receiving, processing, distributing, and archiving NISAR data for the whole world, whereas ISRO is responsible for doing the same thing only vis-à-vis India.
The NDTV article goes on to say:
There are many reasons behind the huge cost incurred by NASA, one of them being that most of the development of the instruments and payloads they fly are made by huge multi-national corporations and they not only need huge profits but also need to share dividends with their share-holders. ISRO, on the other hand, being a national entity does these things in-house and has no reason to pad up the cost to share profits with share-holders.
NASA’s principal contribution to NISAR was the L-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and the associated avionics and the 12-m mesh antenna plus the 9-m boom holding it. All these components were made at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just as ISRO’s contributions onboard NISAR came from its Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad.
Additionally, an ISRO official said that when their scientists travel to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena in California, they would stay in shared $100 a day room while the NASA scientists when they travel to the UR Rao Satellite Center in Bengaluru would stay in an over $500 a day room. This automatically inflates the costs.
We’re talking about a monetary difference of more than 10x between nine- and ten-digit figures. I highly doubt that a small group of scientists staying for N number of days in $500 rooms could make much of a difference. Even if these costs added up in the alleged manner, living comfortably in clean environs is more important than roughing it out to save pennies. I’m also tempted to say that rooms and kitchens in cheaper hotels in the US are likely cleaner than most hotels in India.
Also, India usually makes only one instrument the one that will fly into space, while NASA makes an engineering model and flight model, which leads to doubling the cost.
It increases the cost. However, the engineering model is a fully functional hardware unit that can be subjected to full-scale integration testing without risking the actual flight unit. Teams can also work on software development, system integration, and ground testing in parallel while the flight model is still being assembled, avoiding bottlenecks and improving the flight model’s build. If an issue arises after launch, engineers on the ground replicate the problem on the engineering model before trying fixes on the actual spacecraft — an ability that came in handy during the Boeing Starliner crewed flight test. Finally, the engineering model is subjected to more aggressive and destructive testing, and what engineers learn they use to improve the flight model, increasing the chances that it will succeed. In the end, for the additional cost, NASA is able to send better instruments to space that operate within narrower margins of error.
The funny thing is ISRO may also have to switch to similar developmental processes in future as it embarks on more sophisticated projects, including interplanetary sample-return missions and crewed lunar landings. I hope ISRO, unlike NDTV, isn’t taking overmuch pride in its supposed frugality.
The way human power is distributed is also very different between NASA and ISRO at the Indian space agency. In the case of NISAR, which has taken over 11 years to build, the teams at ISRO working on multiple satellites and the salaries in India also turn out to be much lower when converted into dollar terms. The top manager at ISRO also pointed out that ISRO engineers are willing to put in long hours and work over weekends, while the US contract engineers are reluctant to put in long hours.
Don’t just convert it into dollar terms. Also check whether the values of each work-hour with respect to the national economy in the two countries are comparable. Short of that, let’s avoid such comparisons altogether.
There’s also more than meets the eye in valorising people being “willing” to put in longer hours and to work over the weekends while diminishing a person’s reluctance to do so. In fact, there’s a thin line between a person volunteering to put in extra and a person being expected to put in extra. I’ve seen firsthand company cultures veering over time to make the latter a foundational expectation, with managers often justifying it by saying things like “this is what it takes”, “do it for the <insert cause here>”, and “if you don’t want to, you’re in the wrong industry”. It is a worker’s right to limit their working hours to the stipulated ones. If India’s satellites are cheaper because ISRO is overworking its labour force, we’re doing it wrong — and the bill will soon come due.
The premium for insurance also adds to the costs at ISRO since the government takes the full liability and no insurance is taken. In other countries, insurance premiums can be a huge cost. Incidentally, when India launched its communication satellite using the SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket, India also took insurance.
NISAR costs around $1.5 billion. If I’m not mistaken, launch insurance typically costs 15-25% of the total insured value, which is the cost to replace the satellite and to launch it. In this case that would be $225-375 million. After launch coverage expires (which is when the satellite completes one year in orbit), the annual in-orbit insurance usually costs 1-3% per year, which is around $15-45 million a year. Given NISAR’s expected lifetime of three years, the total insurance cost could be $255-465 million; if we go by NISAR’s design lifetime of five-plus years, it could come to $285-555 million.
The NDTV article also calls out the irony inherent to a NASA satellite scheduled to lift off onboard a GSLV Mk-II rocket. To the uninitiated: this is deserved because the US government scuttled a deal in the early 1980s for the Soviet Union to transfer cryogenic engine technology to India. India was subsequently forced to develop the engines on its own by taking apart and studying the Soviet engines it was able to buy, ultimately building the machine that powers the third stage of the GSLV Mk-II. (Edit: updated at 8.43 pm on July 31, 2025, from “fourth” to “third” stage.) However, the narrative goes on:
Some would say this is an irony of ironies, and some would say it is egg on the face of US.
Unless the article could quote someone (by name) actually making these claims, the strength of language in the second half of the statement is unfounded. In fact, the author may have been better off staking the claim themselves — “I believe this is egg on the US’s face” — but even then they will have to justify how it can be reconciled with several changes in NASA’s and the US’s leadership as well as policies regarding working with ISRO/India since the 1980s.
Rather than concern ourselves with superficial one-upmanship, we would be better off discussing the demands of the different realities of ISRO and NASA. Both organisations have made conscious choices to develop spacecraft the way they do. Their needs are different and their political-economic contexts are wildly different. Expenditure and achievement may not be directly related because material and labour costs are lower in India yet they are deeply connected to an ambition mismatch as well. In order for ISRO to contribute Rs 800 crore to a climate-focused Earth-observing mission, (i) NASA had to conceive of NISAR based on climate scientists’ inputs and (ii) spend $1.1 billion of its own for the L-band SAR and the giant antenna, without which even ISRO’s S-band SAR wouldn’t have the resolution and swath width it currently does. But to be sure: one’s ambitions are not ‘greater’ than the other’s; they’re just different.t
It also matters that, leading up to the launch, NASA officials and scientists have embarked on a media blitz. It’s proving really easy right now to catch hold of a NASA scientist for an extended interview on NISAR — but not an ISRO scientist.
For all these reasons, it’s always more sensible to celebrate ISRO in terms that don’t invoke rupees or by comparing and contrasting its feats with that of another space agency.
