One particular indicator that a country is ready to move forward to the next level of technological advancement would be space travel and exploration – and while the U.S. and Russia kicked things off with the race to the moon in the 1960s, here we are with more recent advancements in this field such as the Maven spacecraft finally arriving in the orbit of Mars after traveling for close to a year. India has taken steps to make their first interplanetary mission a success after passing a critical test that involved testing of the main liquid engine of the $75-million Mangalyaan Mars Orbiter for four seconds.
$75 million might sound like a whole lot of money, but it is actually considered to be low cost, especially when you take a look at the other space programs of different nations whose numbers run up to the hundreds of millions and even billions. Four seconds might not sound as though it is sufficient, but it has served its purpose.
V Koteswara Rao, scientific secretary to the space agency Indian Space Research Organization, or ISRO, shared, “We have just test-fired the engine for 3.968 seconds and it has served two purposes. We restarted the engine after 300 days and we were able to fire it. It was also a useful trajectory-correction maneuver where we reduced the velocity of the spacecraft by 2.18 meters per second from a speed 22.5 kilometers per second, a small decrement.”