India has a space program with project budgets less than the movie 'Gravity.' They have successfully launched a spaceship that arrives in Mars orbit this September. Cost? $75 Million! Wow!

How do they keep costs down?

Although costs for engineers are $1000 a month, that alone cannot reduce the costs to the level they need. So they use a lot of typical Indian cost savings:

Repurposing old technology into new. Rather than starting from scratch, they refine 1970's propellant technology to work today.
Modularity. Everything fits together like lego blocks across all their projects.
Less testing. (Yikes!)
Younger engineers
Unpaid overtime due to a motivated workforce

The projects seem to be working and I believe there is a lot we can learn from this program.