Spaceflight: The beagle is grounded

Went to a lecture by Prof Colin Pillinger last night. All the times I've seen and heard him, I never realized that he was disabled, hobbling around on two sticks. What a fighter.

• He did Beagle not because it was easy but -- in the Kennedy-like cliche -- because it was hard
• The UK is the fifth richest nation on the planet, but spends on space like we were the 17th richest
• Two-thirds of probes to Mars have failed. The Public Accounts Committee told Pillinger that they didn't want British taxpayers' money involved unless a project was 99% likely to succeed (so why did they let us go to war against Iraq?)
• Beagle II aimed high, briefly caught the imagination of a nation, fired up a new generation of scientists, and increased the £5bn contribution that space already makes to the UK's GDP. Not bad for a failure that cost us less than a quid each.
  
• The folks at the European Space Agency said they'd help pick up where Beagle left off. The date of this proposed mission has shifted from 2007, to 2009, to 2011, to 2013 and now to 2015. ESA, by the way, criticized Pillinger's management skills.
  

On the other hand: one elderly, crippled, eccentric scientist, against all the odds, nearly pulled it off -- nearly put a probe on Mars, nearly dug into its soil, nearly got to a point where it could have made the greatest scientific discovery of them all.

Beagle cost £55m. When I got home, I read that Cambridge County Council has just put a bid in for over £400m of government money, in order to improve Cambridge's congested traffic.

I am beginning to think I may not walk on the moon, after all.