Mangalyaan, India’s First Mars Mission

Still, it would make a difference in those people lives, even fighting corruption.

Corruption often comes hand-in-hand with poverty.

Speaking from experience as someone that has already traveled quite a bit around the world.

ISRO stream is up: http://216.185.104.74/isro (needs Windows Media Player).

Those people claiming ISRO does it at a shoe string budget, because they reuse yes they do. But we are talking of a factor of more 10 here.

Let me put facts on ground. Go and visit any ISRO campus in India. See the kind of offices they work in, they kind of food canteens they eat lunch at, they kind of buses they travel in and take a look at how much they are paid. I assure you will be shocked. In fact shocked will be a mild statement to make. These people work on ordinary steel tables, with fans over their heads. Eat the 15 rupee rice-curry meal and travel in 20 year old buses. Well forget all that. Take a look at pictures of ISRO available over the internet, they look like to be taken in some one's garage than a space research organization.

Your average MacOS/iOS app development start up has better working conditions and infrastructure than any ISRO office in India. I'm not talking just about the work place infrastructure. Even the working gear, stuff like computers etc.

For the salaries and the net compensation ISRO offers no ambitious well qualified youth in India would be willing to work there- I'm even surprised they have even gotten this far. Note, you are comparing a salary for something like 20K per month with a salary of something like 100K a month Google offers. You get peanuts for building the most important pieces of technology in the history of mankind, compared to building websites for sharing cat pictures.

This is working on shoe string budgets to its very extreme. I hope these people get better funding in the future.

And yeah for those people too worked up about spending some 100th decimal rounding error of India's budget on a mars project. That is doing far more benefit to India's reputation, than a yet-another-scam-infested scheme.

Live youtube broadcast here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DcSDOkDvyQ

One of the bigger questions is international aid.

"Since 2007 India has been the world's largest recipient of recorded remittances from abroad. In 2010 these inflows were worth $54bn (£35bn). UK foreign direct investment in India is considerable, reaching £1.8bn in the same year."

You can't really on the one hand claim your country is terribly poor, and needs handouts from other nations, and on the other play at being spacemen.

Thankfully the UK will stop sending foreign aid to India in 2015.