How was Beagle born?
We worked on samples. We moved on to meteorites. We actually built our first space instrument to go to go to a comet. That's flying now. It was launched about the same time as Beagle 2, but it's on a very long flight because it has to fly out to five and a half astronomical units, which is five and a half times the distance we are from the sun. It flies out there, rendezvous with a comet, when the comet is quiescent (that is, it hasn't developed into its coma and its tail and things). It's going to fly back in. We're going to land an instrument on the comet, and it's going to come in with the comet. We'll be taking measurements as the comet starts to make what people know and love as comets: the water and stuff starts to boil off and you get the long tail. So, we're going to follow this process. This will be our first instrument for that. Then, we've been working on Martian meteorites. The European Space Agency decided that they would have a Mars mission, and it was a Mars mission that was only going to be in orbit. I went to them and said, “Look, all this stuff is coming out of Martian meteorites suggesting we might already have found life. You have to go to Mars and land and make experiments.” That's how Beagle was born. They said, “Oh, well, we don't know about that. You haven't got any money, you've not built the spacecraft; you've only built an instrument." I said, “This is just so important, I'll find people who want to do it.” and like the Pied Piper, everywhere I went they said, “Oooo, yeah, we want to do this.” So, all the companies in Britain who worked in space were part of Beagle. They all joined. Some of them joined very quickly, like Astrium (who were then called Matra Marconi Space). They went “Oooo, yeah, this is top hole for our business. We want to do this because this would motivate our staff. Let's get in this.” It just sort of built up; it just grew and grew and grew 'til everybody was in it. All the universities that study planets in Britain had a piece of the action, and we got people in from Germany and the US, as well.
