Long before the kaju burfis were distributed at the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) moon mission control centre on the night of November 14, scientists had spent hours over coffee, tea and lunch interactions highlighting for the public the significance of the Chandrayaan-I mission.

For ISRO, often at the receiving end of criticism for embarking on a Rs 386-crore journey across 386,000 km, amid India’s still developing status, the need to communicate that the mission was not about being an ‘also ran’ has always been high on the agenda.

Lost in the clutter of technical specifications and the euphoria of the successful landing on the moon have, however, been little stories on how low cost the mission actually is, on how ISRO pulled as a team, on some of the possible scientific gold lying at the end.

Project director for the moon mission M Annadurai narrates one anecdote to explain cost comparisons and hints at possible future commercial benefits of the mission.

“When ISRO built the basic stripped-down spacecraft for the moon mission, we received an offer from the United States for purchase of a similar spacecraft at four times the cost we had incurred to build it. We built it at a cost of Rs 80 crore,” he says.

In the mission control room on Friday night, soon after the Tricolour settled on the surface of the moon onboard the Moon Impact Probe (MIP), ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair, peeved by frequent questions on cost viability, announced that ISRO had given the country much more than the Government had invested in it.

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