A $74 million Indian spacecraft entered orbit around Mars today after an almost yearlong voyage, and for 11 percent the cost of the U.S.’s Maven probe. 
 
 Mangalyaan, or “Mars craft” in Hindi, made orbit after a trip of about 661 million kilometers (411 million miles), the Indian Space Research Organization said. The satellite is India’s first Mars mission and reached the red planet two days after the $671 million Maven craft. 
 
 “History has been created today,” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, wearing a red vest, said in a speech today at the ISRO’s office in Bengaluru, formerly known as Bangalore. “We have dared to reach out into the unknown and have achieved the near impossible.” 
 
 India joins the U.S., Europe and Russia in orbiting Mars, giving Modi an opportunity to promote the country’s technological capabilities and lower costs to woo foreign investment. The South Asian nation is trying to keep up with China, which plans to complete a manned space station by 2022. 
 
 “This is a big step,” said Bangalore-based B.N. Raghunandan, a former chairman of the aerospace engineering department at the Indian Institute of Science. “People will see India as a destination for high-end projects. But there are a number of technologies in space, like human space missions, where we are nowhere near what China has done.” 
 
 ‘Pride of Asia’ 
 
 India’s 4.5 billion rupee ($74 million) mission seeks to map the Martian surface, study the atmosphere and search for methane gas, a sign that the planet can support life, according to ISRO, a government agency. India’s space program is the first to enter the Mars orbit in its first attempt, President Pranab Mukherjee said in a statement. 
 
 Mangalyaan, also known as the Mars Orbiter Mission, is expected to orbit Mars for six months and send data back to Earth until its fuel supplies are exhausted, according to ISRO. 
 
 “This is pride of India and pride of Asia and also is a landmark progress in humankind’s exploration of outer space,” the Press Trust of India reported, citing China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying. “So we congratulate India on that.” 
 
 The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA, has said that Maven will study the red planet’s upper atmosphere. NASA data shows about half the more than three dozen missions to Mars over the last five decades have failed, including Chinese and Japanese attempts. 
 
 “We congratulate ISRO for its Mars arrival! Mars Orbiter joins the missions studying the Red Planet,” NASA said in a Twitter post today. 
 
 Low-Cost Mission 
 
 Modi hailed India’s space program in June after witnessing the launch of a rocket carrying five foreign satellites, adding that the domestic industry is the world’s most cost-effective. India used a smaller rocket and payload to reduce costs, Modi said today. 
 
 “This mission costs less than it takes to make a Hollywood movie,” Modi said today. “These are the achievements that will go down as landmarks in history.” 
 
 He’s boosted annual spending on the program 50 percent to 60 billion rupees ($983 million), compared with about $17.5 billion in the U.S. That step effectively rebutted critics who argue a nation can ill-afford such projects when two-thirds of its 1.2 billion people live on less than $2 a day. 
 
 India launched its first space rocket in 1963 and its first satellite in 1975. An unmanned mission to the moon that ended in 2009 showed water formation there may be occurring. 
 
 Modi, who won a general election in May by a landslide after pledging to revive economic growth, is due to unveil a campaign called “Make in India” tomorrow as part a push to expand manufacturing in the $1.9 trillion economy. 
 
 To contact the reporter on this story: Ganesh Nagarajan in Chennai at gnagarajan1@bloomberg.net 
 
 To contact the editors responsible for this story: Arijit Ghosh at aghosh@bloomberg.net Sunil Jagtiani, Daniel Ten Kate ||||| Story highlights Only NASA, the former Soviet Union and Europeans have succeeded with Mars probes 
 
 India's spacecraft will explore the planet's surface features, minerals and atmosphere 
 
 ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan says one of the biggest technological challenges is just getting there 
 
 NASA is due to launch its MAVEN probe to Mars later in November 
 
 India has launched a rocket it hopes will allow it to join an elite group of space explorers to Mars. 
 
 The country's space research organization (ISRO) launched its orbiter to the Red Planet on Tuesday -- only NASA, the former Soviet Union and the Europeans have previously been successful in operating probes from Mars. 
 
 Japan made an attempt with the Nozomi orbiter in 1998 but it failed to reach the planet and a Chinese probe was lost along with the Russian Phobos-Grunt mission in January 2012 . The UK's Beagle 2 probe separated from the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter in 2003 but nothing was ever heard from the lander. 
 
 It will take 10 months for India's Mars Orbiter Mission to reach the Red Planet after lifting off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre near Chennai. The probe will explore the planet's surface features, minerals and atmosphere. 
 
 ISRO is hoping to discover more about the loss of water from Mars, map the sources of methane gas, as well as collecting data about the two moons Phobos and Deimos. 
 
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 But ISRO chairman K Radhakrishnan told CNN that one of the biggest technological challenges was just getting there. Many missions have failed to reach the planet while others have crashed on the surface or contact has been lost before the probes could send back data. 
 
 India's space program launched its first Earth satellite in 1975 and put an unmanned probe into orbit around the Moon in 2008. It plans to launch its own manned spaceflight in 2016, though an Indian cosmonaut, Rakesh Sharma, flew aboard a Soviet space mission in 1984. 
 
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 The U.S. is aiming to build on the success of a series of robots that have roamed the surface of the Red Planet when it launches its own orbiter mission called Maven -- Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft -- scheduled to launch on November 18. 
 
 The European Space Agency is working with the Russians on an ExoMars rover that is due to start its mission in 2018. 
 
 But private companies are also proposing trips to the Red Planet -- and some of them are only one-way.
– It may soon get a little more crowded around Mars: India has successfully launched a spacecraft headed for the red planet, putting the country a 300-day journey away from being the fourth space agency to get there, the BBC reports. The Mars Orbiter Mission took off from a base on India's east coast this morning and if it survives the journey, it will carry out experiments including searching for methane in the Martian atmosphere. NASA, the European Space Agency, and the former Soviet Union have successfully sent probes to Mars, but failure is pretty common, CNN notes. Britain's Beagle 2 probe vanished in 2003, a Chinese probe was lost last year, and Japan's Nozomi orbiter was unable to reach its goal in 1998. Some commentators wonder why a country with such high rates of malnutrition is spending money on a Mars program, but the program's defenders say the project is relatively cheap, at $72 million, and will result in technological development that could benefit India's industries.