MUCH goes bang over India at this time of year, amid celebrations for Diwali, the Hindu festival of light. By one estimate, Indians spend over $800m a year on fireworks. But, in cosmic terms, they barely leave the ground. How much more exciting that a single, 4.5 billion-rupee ($74m) rocket is set to whoosh high into the sky on November 5th.

This one is not intended to explode, though in December 2010 scientists had to blow up a rocket that went haywire after a launch. Instead the idea is to send a craft to Mars. If all goes well, the rocket will lift Mangalyaan (“Mars vehicle”), which looks like a big box of gold foil, into orbit round the Earth. After stretching its solar wings and fiddling with its trajectory, it will set off on the nine-month trip to Earth’s neighbour.

Koppillil Radhakrishnan, head of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), says all is ready, weather permitting. Scientists aboard two ships in the South Pacific will track the launch, then Americans will help to watch. One point of the trip, he says, is to sniff out any methane in the Martian atmosphere. When the mission was first conceived the possibility of methane on Mars, where it might signal life, was attracting a lot of attention; proving its presence would have been a big deal. Since then, alas, NASA’s Curiosity rover has more or less ruled such a discovery out. But even without a scientific breakthrough, getting a spacecraft into orbit round Mars will demonstrate Indian prowess. Most bits of the launch rocket are home-made, along with 50-60% of the orbiter.

Indeed, the mission has the air of trying to outdo the Chinese. Mr Radhakrishnan waves away talk of rivalry, declaring that “we are only in a race with ourselves to excel in this area”. Yet Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister, announced the project last year shortly after a joint Chinese-Russian mission to Mars had failed.

ISRO, with a budget of 67 billion rupees and a decent pool of 16,000 scientists, engineers and other staff, would indeed brag if all goes well. Generally, though, the agency is cautious. Dreams of launching an astronaut by 2016 have been scrapped; there is a new emphasis on commercial launches. With economic growth slowing and sharp cuts in government spending, the race to space is proving more modest, too.