Alcaray's linked article said the following:

>Indeed, the Beagle 2 team is small. "There are no duplicate positions here.
>When we had our system team, it was tiny -- no more than about eight to10
>people ever, and usually it was six. So the team was and is very small, with
>no fat, no frills."

Small is beautiful if the guys making up the team are seasoned veterans. Keeping things small and simple was Kelly Johnson's key to success. The design team that created the SR-71 was about 75 guys working off of one set of blue prints. However with the SR-71, Kelly Johnson was such a sharp engineer that when someone did screw up, Johnson would immediately detect the error. I have no doubt that the guys who designed Beagle 2 are bright engineers but this would have been their maiden effort at designing a Mars lander. When we did the heat shield for MER, we had two teams working independently using different software and design methods. We'd then get together for Preliminary Design Review (PDR) and see if our different methods produced the same result (it did!). There were screwups but other teams caught the errors. For example, we were told to make the forebody heat shield as light as possible (the rover guys were exceeding their mass budget). So we made it super light. Then the stability guys told us that the vehicle's center-of-mass had gone too far aft and we'd need to ballast the nose. Another team investigating heat shield separation found out that while the vehicle was descending on its parachute, the dynamic pressure could blow the ejected heat shield back onto the vehicle, possibly damaging the vehicle or worsening the parachute swing. We solved the problem by using a heavier and stronger grade of honeycomb for the heatshield's structure (the rover guys had to stay within their mass budget). I wonder if Beagle 2's engineers thought about ejected heat shield blow back?

Gary