The Indian space agency’s Mars Mission, launching next week, is the cheapest by any nation to the red planet. And there are attributes unique to ISRO that enable it to practise frugal engineering at the cutting edge time and again.To understand the spirit of India’s Mars mission, it is useful to look first at the country’s moon mission in 2008.The Chandrayaan-I project, as it is known, was announced in 2003, by the then-prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in 2003. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) had partners, the Europeans and Americans, who had their own experiments to f ly in Chandrayaan. Some of them were puzzled by ISRO’s style of working. They were just 18 months away from the launch date, and ISRO was only beginning to cut metal. One of the foreign partners had then asked ISRO managers: “Are you serious?”The spacecraft f lew as planned in November 2008, operated for 312 days, and achieved most of its objectives. ISRO’s partners, pleased that their instruments were working fine, tacitly acknowledged the value of the organisation’s minimalist approach. “The told us after the launch,” says M Annadurai, project manager of Chandrayaan, “that this was the Indian style of working”. It was a tested method in ISRO, perfected over decades, and it is now being used to maximum effect in Mangalyaan: save time, money and human efforts through careful planning.You could call it frugal engineering applied to space. Mangalyaan was formally approved only in August 2012, and ISRO had started work on the structure three months before the formal approval. The satellite was finished this August.NASA’s MAVEN, a Mars mission nearly identical to Mangalyaan and to be flown on November 18, had taken at least five years of work and $679 million in costs. If the Mangalyaan launch is successful, ISRO would have done it in 18 months, with $69 million. “Our speed of execution and low costs are the result of careful planning,” says Annadurai.When ISRO was set up in the 1960s, moon and Mars missions were not on the agenda, even in the faraway future. “We do not have the fantasy of competing with the economically advanced nations in the exploration of the moon or the planets or manned space-flight,” its founder Vikram Sarabhai had famously said. Space technology was purely for the benefit of the society.With such clear objectives, and working in a period when India was very poor, ISRO’s leaders developed a style that produced maximum benefits with the minimum of effort.“Frugal engineering comes naturally to Indians,” says National Research Professor RA Mashelkar, “which is why India delivers more than any other country per dollar of R&D investment.” Mashelkar, along with management theorist CK Prahlad, wrote a landmark paper on frugal engineering in the Harvard Business Review three years ago.According to Mashelkar, Indians learned this technique because of the environment. “Indians grow up in scarcity, but also have high aspirations. These two conditions create a powerful combination,” he says. ISRO’s ambitions were high, but money was scarce.So, for two decades, ISRO created some of the best examples of frugal engineering in India.In the 21st century, when the world tries hard for low-cost access to space, other nations are looking at ISRO with interest and trying to use some of the principles it had perfected. ISRO is also becoming an important collaborator for NASA and Europe.ISRO’s engineering now revolves around a few core principles: adapt technology as much as possible, minimise the number of physical models, optimise on testing, and work round the clock. Adaptation is an old method that has now been perfected to an art in ISRO. As in many Indian products, ISRO uses technology in unusual ways not always directly evident to developed country engineers.In 1981, when India launched its first major satellite called APPLE, it used a motor from its untested rocket called Satellite Launch Vehicle (SLV). This rocket had only one launch—that too failed—before APPLE went up on an Ariane rocket, but the adaptation was successful.In space engineering, where conditions are tough and costs of failure high, it is not easy to adapt technology. It also involves more risk, but ISRO is willing to take—and manage— that risk. “Traditional ways take a long time and for ISRO time is of essence,” says Alok Chatterjee, project engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA. “So, its approach is an innovative way to do space missions.”Chatterjee is a former ISRO employee who had been working with NASA for 28 years, and had collaborated with his former employer on the Chandrayaan.For Mangalyaan, the major adaptation was on using the PSLV rocket. ISRO had been making changes to this rocket for two decades. In recent times, it has miniaturised the avionics, and built its own chip and onboard computer. “For us, a pedigree is necessary,” says ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan, “and we make changes when necessary.” The capability of the PSLV has changed over the years, now resulting in three classes of rockets. And yet, using it for a trip to Mars was quite an adaptation and involved risk.ISRO has been taking calculated risks for a long time. When it used the apogee motor from SLV-3 for APPLE, it was not an optimal choice available and the rocket was not even ready. However, even in those days, the organisation used to think up novel ways to use technology effectively. This practice has only strengthened with time. “In ISRO, technology has multiple uses,” says YS Rajan, honorary distinguished professor of ISRO. “One programme feeds into the other.” No other agency has used such a small rocket like PSLV for an interplanetary mission. Rather than reducing complexity, it had made the launch manoeuvres more complex.The second innovation in Mangalyaan, also involving risk, was to make only one physical model of the spacecraft. ISRO had done it in Chandrayaan and then brought this experience to Mangalyaan. NASA and the European Space Agency usually make three physical models iteratively. ISRO did everything in software and then made the final model that flew. It is not that others did not use software, but ISRO made a decision to put it to full use. “We are not using the full power of software if we make three models,” says Annadurai. Doing away with two physical models was an important factor, if not the most important, in speeding up the development of the spacecraft.Other factors helped too. Testing was optimised as much as possible, and this saved costs and speeded up the development process. “Testing is expensive,” says Radhakrishnan, “and we try to get the maximum information from each test.” ISRO engineers worked round the clock, often in shifts, when the satellite was being made.ISRO made aggressive schedules that were nearly always sacrosanct. “ISRO is one of the few organisations in India that is driven by schedules,” says Rajan. These principles— technology adaptation and aggressive scheduling— reduced the freedom of its engineers to try completely new things. “We do not allow someone to build a completely new rocket,” says Radhakrishnan. It is the price ISRO has paid for increased speed and efficiency. Reducing cost and speeding up work are now key goals of all space organisations. NASA achieves this through competition.Instead of one large organisation driving programmes centrally, it creates parallel teams that compete against each other for key projects. This change was made in the 1990s and made NASA more efficient. However, NASA is a conservative organisation that often builds completely new technologies, and so it may not take the course that ISRO has.ISRO has new technologies too. In the long run, how ISRO balances new technology development with adaptation could determine its success. Chandrayaan-II would go up in a few years. ISRO would get more ambitious with Mars if Mangalyaan is successful.