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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday February 18 2014, @05:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the Applied-SiddhÄnta dept.

Popeidol writes:

"In November, India took the next step in their space program by launching their Mangalyaan Mars orbiter. The orbiter won't arrive for a while yet, but they've managed to get some public attention for a different reason: the fact that the entire mission costs only 75 million dollars, substantially less than the budget for the hit movie 'Gravity.'

While the question of wages is bound to come up (it was only 15% of the budget of the project), I think we can all agree that bringing down the cost of interplanetary space travel to a level attainable by the ultra-rich is a good step forward."

 
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  • (Score: 1) by mcgrew on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:04PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Wednesday February 19 2014, @05:04PM (#2611) Homepage Journal

    You're comparing one country's space program (US) with that country's film industry, when there are a lot of other spacefaring countries and a lot of countries that make films; India and China come to mind, both make a lot of movies and both have space programs. Then there's Russia, who afaik has no film industry but we need them to launch astronauts to the ISS. What's Russia's budget?

    --
    Poe's Law [nooze.org] has nothing to do with Edgar Allen Poetry
  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Foobar Bazbot on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:06PM

    by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Thursday February 20 2014, @06:06PM (#3605) Journal

    You're comparing one country's space program (US) with that country's film industry, when there are a lot of other spacefaring countries and a lot of countries that make films;

    Yes -- I made the comparison for the country with by far the largest space budget. Check it out [wikipedia.org], NASA's budget is roughly equal to Roskosmos, ESA, JAXA, and the French and German agencies all combined, and as such represents nearly half of the global total.

    India and China come to mind, both make a lot of movies and both have space programs.

    Their space programs both have budgets of about 1.3 billion USD.

    I'm unsure of the dollar sizes of their movie industries (they do have a lot of output, but they have lower costs per film) -- again, falling back on revenues, wikipedia claims [wikipedia.org] the Indian film industry "reached overall revenues of $1.86 billion (Rs 93 billion) in 2011. This is projected to rise to $3 billion (Rs 150 billion) in 2016."
    And for China, wikipedia claims [wikipedia.org] 2.12 billion USD as the domestic gross box office revenues for Chinese films (69% share of 3.6 billion USD for all films, Chinese and foreign -- no, the math doesn't work out right, so maybe "market share" is being computed per-ticket rather than per-money).

    As for the US case, it's unclear how much of either figure is profit, but the revenues are not so low as to rule out movie budgets being greater than space budgets.

    Then there's Russia, who afaik has no film industry but we need them to launch astronauts to the ISS. What's Russia's budget?

    Russia does have a film industry, though I think it is much smaller (relative to space budget) than in other countries I've looked at. Anyway, Roskosmos's budget is 5.6 billion.