[FPSPACE] The Beagle 2 report analysis

[DwayneDay]

I've read the first few pages of the "lessons learned" report and the tone is really off-putting.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is rather congratulatory as well as defensive, about all the hard work put in by the team and all the things that they did right.  Of course, this is a report by the people who did all that hard work, so it's not unexpected, but one would have hoped for a more neutral tone.  As Oliver Morton put it, the message seems to be along the lines of "the operation was successful but the patient died."

Speaking of Morton, the science writer as usual has an excellent summary of the report and presentation:

http://mainlymartian.blogs.com/semijournal/

(Morton's Mars blog is definitely worth reading--and readable.  For instance, if you scroll down you will see a long discussion on the issue of the missing formaldehyde on Mars.  Morton makes it clear that this is a very complex question.)

Morton includes a discussion of the "thin atmosphere" excuse for Beagle 2's demise, which he says is based upon dubious data.

It is also worth reading the comments section, which includes one person stating that Pillinger actually phoned him _twice_ at 3AM Pacific time to complain about an article by Jeff Bell on him.  One would think that Pillinger could look at a clock and realize that 11AM UK time is still Really Dark Pacific Coast time...


A few clips:

"That brings up one of the lessons learned which is mostly between the lines of the reports; that ESA's ambivalence was bad for the project. The implication is that ESA always sort of expected Beagle 2 to drop out, so it never did more than tolerate its presence. One gem in the reports is that ESA didn't actually send representatives to one or two of the critical design reviews. Yet at the same time, ESA didn't actually cancel Beagle either. Now whether a more hands-on ESA would have resulted in better engineering is hard to say; but a firmer commitment might have led to better management and a more even cash flow."

And:

"Colin also said that he'd written to NASA about the possibility of flying a Beagle package as part of the 2009 mission. He painted a sweet picture of the MSL scurrying around picking up samples and bringing them back to little Beagle for consideration. However, it's very hard to believe that Colin really believes this is plausible, and there's no reason at all why any of the rest of us should, despite the fact that this, to judge by the mood of the media at the meeting, will be the idea that gets picked up in the papers. MSL is going to be packed with American instruments aiming at many of the Beagle objectives, and the chances that a large number of them will be turfed off to free up mass for an anglo-european instrument package that's the brainchild of a man quite willing to indulge in some America-bashing when it suits his purposes seem to me negligible. As in nil. Maybe Colin's an eternal optimist. Maybe he's trying to pick a fight, and thinks being rejected or ignored by NASA will help his case elsewhere. Your guess is probably as good as mine."


Morton makes the really prescient point that the real thing that was wrong with Beagle 2 was its overall existence--either they should have done it better (more money, more attention), or they should have not done it at all.  The very fact that they have such a huge list of possible failure explanations illustrates the real problem: this was no way to conduct a space mission.



DDAY