As Chandrayaan-3 comes to fruition on Wednesday with the Vikram lander attempting to soft-land on the moon’s forbidding south pole, making India the first country to do so, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s mission has caught the imagination of the world.
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk reacted to a post about India’s moon mission on X, formerly called Twitter, which he owns. An account named Newsthink wrote that Chandrayaan-3 is estimated to cost $75 million (Rs 620 crore approximately), considerably less than the budget of Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, which cost $165 million.
The film, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Matt Damon and Michael Caine, was set in a dystopian future where humanity is facing extinction and a group of astronauts travel to find an exoplanet capable of supporting life.
“Kinda crazy when you realize India’s budget for Chandrayaan-3 ($75M) is less than the film Interstellar ($165M),” Newsthink wrote. Musk reacted to the post and wrote, “Good for India.”
Good for India 🇮🇳!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 22, 2023
“That’s insane. I love entertainment and Interstellar is one of my favourite movies, but humanity should spend way less money entertaining ourselves and way more money exploring and trying to understand the nature of our universe,” an X user commented. “Well, India spent $75 million in INR ₹6.15 billion If The currency exchanges were equal, it is still more than 6 billion cost It’s likely that by 2075 both currencies will be around equal INR 615 crore is a very big amount in India,” said another.
“That’s the cost of the third mission. They would leverage the lessons learnt and technologies from the past 2 missions hence those costs should also be considered,” wrote a third.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission is the follow-up to the Chandrayaan-2 mission of 2019, when the Vikram lander crashed into the lunar surface.
If the mission succeeds, India will join a small and exclusive club of countries that have managed to soft-land on the moon. So far the United States, the Soviet Union and China have done it.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Kashmir Monitor staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
