Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) successfully completed an unnmanned mission to Mars on its first attempt and had a budget that could easily be tripled by a Hollywood production profiling the ragtag team of underdog Indian scientists who believe in science and simplicity.

The spacecraft Mangalyaan entered Mars orbit last Wednesady, such a feat has never been accomplished by any of the other nations that landed robots on Mars (most space agencies require at least 2 attempts). The project ran with a measly budget of $70 million dollars.

S. Arunan, the project director for ISRO’s Mars Orbital Mission (MOM), is widely regarded as the driving force behind the mission that led to the unprecedented successes. According to a story from the Delhi Daily News, Arunan credits “complex mathematics and simple living,” to the MOM project low cost and astonishing success.

Arunan was picked as MOM project director 10 months before the scheduled launch, and immediately delved into volumes of research. Ultimately, he concluded that the initial issues with the launch and trajectory of the spacecraft would be similar to Chandrayaan, an unmanned ISRO lunar lander launched in 2008, but the deep space in between Earth and Mars would pose a greater problem:

“The mission was much bigger,” said Arunan to the Times of India. “We had never communicated with satellites beyond 36,000 km, and here we had to do it across 400 million km. We had to develop an autonomous system for the spacecraft to travel on its own and carry out pre-fed commands.”

Arunan exemplified hard work ethic, which inspired his team of 200 scientists to work tirelessly at mission control.

“He would come home well past midnight and leave before dawn. I wondered if he was sleepwalking,” said Arunan’s wife Geetha.