India’s space agency ISRO sent a probe into orbit around Mars on its very first attempt, a feat no other agency had managed on a maiden voyage, and did it for roughly $73 million, less than Hollywood spent making the film Gravity. This episode unpacks the Mars Orbiter Mission, unofficially known as Mangalyaan, and how a brutal 15-month timeline and a tiny budget forced the team to reuse the spacecraft bus from the Chandrayaan lunar missions, lean on software simulations instead of costly ground tests, and work 18 to 20 hour days to catch the late 2013 launch window.

When cryogenic engine problems with the GSLV rocket threatened a three-year delay, ISRO switched to the smaller PSLV and used repeated orbit-raising burns at perigee to slingshot the craft toward Mars. We cover the November 2013 engine underburn caused by energizing both flow-control valve coils at once, the fix that fired them sequentially, the fuel spent hiding behind Mars from Comet Siding Spring, the five-instrument 15-kilogram science payload, the methane sensor repurposed into an albedo mapper, and how a six-month mission survived seven and a half years before a seven-hour eclipse drained its batteries in April 2022.

• Why the 26-month Earth-Mars launch window left ISRO just 15 months to design, build, and test the spacecraft
• How the Oberth effect and a series of perigee burns made up for the PSLV’s lack of raw power
• The flow-control valve glitch that cut a 135 m/s burn to 35 m/s and how the ground team fixed it in two days
• What the Lyman Alpha Photometer, MENCA exospheric analyzer, and Mars Colour Camera revealed about Mars
• How arriving with 40 kilograms of leftover fuel stretched a six-month mission into a multi-year legacy printed on the 2000 rupee note