As a proponent of increased space exploration, it's awesome to see the emerging space race between China and India. NASA (a creature of Congress) has stagnated US efforts by hanging on far too long to the failed and obsolete Shuttle platform as the centerpiece of our activities. A diversity of inexpensive US robotic programs are the way forward-- that plus lowering the regulatory and litigation barriers to increased private space launches in the US. It's tragic that we will waste $700 billion on a Wall Street bailout when that amount could send a man to Mars and create a permanent lunar base.
Then again, if you look at the Mars rover missions, they have vastly exceeded expections - so over-engineering can be a two-way street.<p>(Beagle2 might be a counterpoint to that).
>> More than 30% of the sub-systems that went into Chandrayaan-1 were used by us in other operations.<p>A strategy followed by Indian IT services companies :) See what resources they have got in other projects, pull them over quickly, finish their part and let them go. This way the project's cost won't sky rocket because they are re-using a lot of stuff which on their own would've cost a lot more to build.