local Australian folks recorded 3rd stage footage.

… when you're paying Indian salaries. I'm pretty sure that paying NASA, ESA or JAXA engineers less than 12k USD/year [1] would result in exactly 0 of them staying on the job.

[1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/india-aerospace-engineeri...

Taking the $146 million quoted above at face value, that means 2/3 of Chandrayaan-2's cost was independent of launch cost. Let's say about $100 million.

Another comment here is implying that those $100 million do not include labor. I find that hard to believe; it is (or should be) common knowledge that the bulk or aerospace project costs is labor [2], so it would make no sense to forgo standard accounting practice and only report what amounts to a bill of materials. But if we nevertheless assume that comment is correct, it would mean that you should at least double the estimated cost for developing something equivalent to Chandrayaan-2 at developed-country aerospace salaries. So you would be (optimistically) spending something like $200 million on the probe, and saving maybe $15 million out of a total cost ~ $250 million by launching it from India rather than e.g. the US.

Once the added administration and logistics costs are taken into account, I wonder if you would be saving anything at all.

[1] https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-17-609

[2] Aerospace project management handbook (2017)

When ISRO says it took $146 mn to send Chandrayaan 2, it refers only to engineering costs and not personnel costs.

http://www.economicsdiscussion.net/theory-of-cost/engineerin...