Doug,

The difference here is that Beagle 2 never had a snowball's chance in hell to succeed. It was basically pouring money down a rathole from the very beginning. That's why Pillinger never raised all of the money needed to support the project - he's left a big debt behind, in addition to wasting British tax dollars on a fool's errand. He bullied the government into funding part of the project - money that could have been put to good use on other space science projects.

There's good reason why NASA doesn't send the kind of science package to Mars that were aboard Beagle 2...because we already know what the results will tell us. It wasn't going to produce much new science. That's why Pillinger was forced to do this on the cheap.

Yes, Pillinger "made space cool." But for less than ten bucks, I could have picked up my own Blur CD and enjoyed it a lot more.