Pillinger could have announced to the Mars community that he was going to do an ultra low cost Mars lander through volunteer assistance and by trading mission cost for risk. He could have made it clear that Beagle-2 was a high risk, privately supported mission of a totally different category from a government funded Mars mission. In essence he could have played the Linus Torvalds gambit and IMHO would have had a good shot at success (I know I would have been tempted to contribute to the project).

Instead, Pillinger stated up front that the Americans really didn't know how to properly explore Mars. Americans tended to spend too much money on their spacecraft which provided extremely poor performance for the dollar. Fortunately for Mars exploration, Pillinger believed he was a vastly better engineer than any American and could therefore build a Mars lander for 1/20 the cost. Pillinger also made it clear that through his superior understanding of Mars, he knew the planet's surface was teaming with life. The only reason why the American's had failed to detect life on Mars was due to their abysmal incompetence. Naturally this last bit played well with Cydonia / lunatic fringe crowd. However, what really freaked people out about Pillinger's marketing strategy was the miniscule probability that Beagle-2 could have actually worked. The arch-enemy of the aerospace engineer is the bean counter. The bean counter is always trying to reduce project funding down to the point that project success is in doubt. Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Observer were two examples of projects ruined by a bean counter (Dan Goldin). Had Pillinger been successful with Beagle-2 then American bean counters would have insisted upon significantly reduced funding for future Mars exploration. The fluke of Beagle-2 succeeding would have been followed by an avalanche of underfunded American and European spacecraft failing.

Gary