Backroom Boys

by Francis Spufford

  Pillinger and co. went ahead with a formal application anyway. (They had very little choice.) They laid out the recent developments that made the question about life on Mars serious, not frivolous, to ask. They explained how none of the flotilla of Mars probes planned by NASA and the Japanese over the next few years was setting out to supplement the frustrating, uninformative crudity of the one and only biology experiment performed on Mars, by Viking. They described how the right instrument package could get beneath the surface of Martian sand and Martian rocks, which the ultraviolet radiation pouring down through the thin atmosphere was sure to have sterilised. They demonstrated that they could produce rich and permanently valuable data about the Martian environment, not just an all-or-nothing grope for the telltale chemistry of life in the little patch of ground where the lander happened to fetch up. They built the case; and almost in spite of themselves, the PPARC evaluators found themselves being persuaded. ‘The underlying science’, remembered Paul Murdin, ‘… was surprisingly good. It was a revelation to those of us in the peer review process who were not familiar with all the detail.’ ‘People ended up being supporters whom I would not have expected to be supporters,’ said his colleague Professor Ian Halliday. ‘It was the scientific quality that came through in the proposal that caused a group of people who set out to be rather against Beagle to be very much for it when they read what was being talked about.’ Alas, even now they were very much for Beagle, there was not very much they could do for Beagle. By diligent rooting around, PPARC were eventually able to find a grant of £2.7 million towards Beagle’s instruments.

  And that was it. That was the limit of what Beagle was going to get from conventional sources. There was no point in rummaging elsewhere, in other pockets of the state, for other little deposits of research money that could be used to make Beagle happen. PPARC had all the public money there was for space science in Britain; it was the one and only pocket. The Beagle team were short by £22 million.

  A different strategy was called for, and the clue to it lay in the aspect of the Beagle mission that PPARC had found most troubling: its potential popularity. It had been thought, till the Pathfinder mission to Mars in 1997, that only manned spaceflight had the glamour to draw the public in. NASA’s working assumption until then had been that, hardcore space groupies apart, people would only feel an imaginative investment in space if astronauts were involved, acting as a kind of representative human presence and giving the onlookers somewhere to situate themselves in relation to what they were seeing. Astronauts warmed space up, in media terms. They made it consequential. They provided the marker of human intent without which (it was assumed) any location would be just a set of affectless co-ordinates out there in the vacuum. The unmanned science missions to the planets were for scientists only, not for the general public whose emotions swayed space budgets. But when Pathfinder bounced safely to rest in Ares Vallis, and the six-wheeled rover Sojourner trundled out onto the boulder-studded plain like a big, cute, self-propelling roller skate, NASA discovered it had a spontaneous hit on its hands. It turned out that people were willing for a robot to act as their surrogate on another world, so long as they could feel intimately connected to what it was doing. It was partly the new immediacy of the internet that created the change. Tens of millions of people visited the Pathfinder website and watched the jerky footage of Sojourner’s progress, the first-ever interplanetary video stream. As Sojourner moved, they moved with it, and the little piece of the Martian surface around the deflated airbags stopped being a flat, closed image and became an experienced space, somewhere with dimensions. The watchers sent out a minute, virtual filament of themselves to Mars; they felt that in some distant, jury-rigged, yet still vivid way they had visited the place, they had been present when the shadows swung around the stones, and the sun went down, and the colours changed. They had reached out and found that there was a ‘there’ there. They had experienced a consumer version of the excitement of a planetary scientist like Colin Pillinger. Sojourner, which had done this for them, which embodied human reaching-out, therefore inherited human characteristics. It was anthropomorphised. It became our touching little delegate, our brave little roller skate. It became the little robot that could. All over the world, to NASA’s surprise and their own, people found themselves more interested in Mars than they could quite account for. In Britain, the night that Pathfinder landed, BBC2 put on the kind of evening of eager television which had greeted the Apollo programme a generation earlier. Science-fiction writers were called on to help solidify people’s sense of Mars as a place, to blow a little aromatic Mars dust into the public’s nostrils. Science correspondents explained how the landing would work. NASA’s seductive animation of Pathfinder’s descent was screened over and over, showing how the ride down to the surface would look from the impossible viewpoint of a witness poised just above, or beside, or beneath the craft. Afterwards, when the signal from the surface had been safely received, the TV weather forecast included a special report on the week’s outlook for Ares Vallis. We’re seeing a high-pressure area over the Tharsis Bulge, perhaps as much as eight millibars, and that might mean winds, it might mean daytime temperatures soaring to a balmy minus fifteen Celsius.

  So, suddenly, an unmanned spacecraft could be infused with human emotion. It could carry a freight of feeling. It could be fashionable. Astonishingly, for something as nerdy as a science mission to another planet, it could even be cool.

  The new Labour government, Professor Pillinger noticed, venerated cool. After being swept to office by a surging desire for renewal after eighteen years of Conservatism, they were desperate to associate themselves with whatever else was fresh and hopeful and young on the British scene. They wanted to be cool; yet they did not know how to originate cool. They imitated things that were already popular, without the imitations ever quite working. They showed a great fondness for building museums devoted to pre-chewed, decomplexified versions of the arts and sciences – which people then stayed away from, preferring the sense of contact with the real thing they got at Tate Modern or at the Eden Project. They disapproved of messing around with rockets, if they thought about it at all – too stiff, too old, too redolent of the disappointing past – but they were very willing to be on the side of anything that was publicly acclaimed. This presented an opening. Colin Pillinger devised a cunning plan. He would make Beagle 2 cool. He would make it so cool that it would be hideously embarrassing for the government not to support it. He would engage in an act of deliberate cultural blackmail.

  Over the next two years, while the teams at the Open University and Leicester set to work with the budget they had, and sometimes with no budget at all, he promoted Beagle in all directions. He signed up Damien Hirst to do a tiny spot painting as a test card for Beagle’s camera. ‘I was expecting Jeremy Beadle to walk through the door dressed as a Martian,’ Hirst told the Guardian, ‘but after meeting Colin Pillinger and his wife I got very excited about the project.’ He signed up the astronomy-loving Alex James, Blur’s louche bassist, to write a call sign for the craft. Both BritArt and BritPop were slightly past their peak already, ensuring that by the time Beagle landed on Mars in 2003 it would in effect be a far-flung time capsule, carrying souvenirs from the Cool Britannia phase of the 1990s. But it didn’t matter. Hirst and Blur commanded almost universal recognition, and by getting them onboard, Pillinger collected two complete constituencies for Beagle who had certainly never cared about British space science before. He talked to journalists constantly. The mission lived or died by its publicity, so he made himself available for any Beagle-related event, no matter how remote from the usual science circuit, no matter how apparently undignified. With a cardboard model of Beagle, he appeared at the Chelsea Flower Show, he bantered live with Johnny Vaughan on Channel 4’s Big Breakfast. He set up a BBC documentary on Beagle’s progress. He made a late-night Open University programme about his fondness for cartoons.

  Since the lure of Beagle had to be the lure of a success st
ory, it was necessary for him to sound certain from the very beginning. He had to strike a note of almost manic confidence. He had to buccaneer a bit. He had (in a big whiskers, baggy jumper, eccentric scientist sort of way) to swagger. Once this manner had settled on him, it was hard for him to switch it off, even in situations where it might not be the most effective way of proceeding. He told the House of Commons committee Paul Murdin had just spoken to, ‘We ain’t going bust; we are going to Mars. That is the message I am telling people about this whole project of Beagle … We are going to Mars. If you want to be part of this mission, get on board or you are going to miss out.’ Fortunately, the MPs thought he was marvellous. Because he had not been able to get Beagle funded the conventional way, it had become much more his mission, his cause than a space-science project usually was for the person appointed to be its Principal Investigator. He felt, understandably, that if PPARC weren’t paying, then they also weren’t in charge. The collective responsibilities of science did not govern here. ‘I will accept the responsibility of raising the last amounts of money,’ he told the MPs, ‘as long as I do not have instructions as to how to manage the project, which I have brought from a blank sheet of paper, and zero in the budget, to where we are.’ They looked back at him and they saw Mr Space, a visionary who was making a British Mars mission happen by sheer individual willpower. It was a role he had the charisma to live up to.

  In case they were still connected to anything, he assiduously pressed all the old cultural buttons: the wartime greatness button, the Dan Dare button, the plucky British underdog button. And some of them, rusted-over though they were in their ancient bakelite console, did still move and did still move people. ‘The British-led Exploration of Mars,’ declared the Beagle website. But he didn’t depend on the limited audience who could remember when it looked as if squadron leaders might drink tea beside the Sea of Tranquility. It had been a very long time since then. Many people had no idea that Britain had ever been the kind of country which built spaceships. They were surprised, now, to be told they were allowed to want this sort of thing, this throwback of a project which temporarily reversed the trend in Britain from solid to virtual engineering; this real spaceship, after decades of practice at manufacturing imaginary ones. Britain was where Elite came from. It was where Iain Banks, Gwyneth Jones, Ian McDonald, Stephen Baxter and Ken McLeod wrote brilliant fiction about space. It was where Babylon Zoo sang, ‘I always wanted you to go into space, man!’ It was the home of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, for heaven’s sake, not of missions to Mars. So Pillinger had some improbability to get past. But here the smallness of Beagle helped. When he was on the road with the cardboard model, people were amused, but as if in consequence, they also found themselves permitted to feel proud. Beagle owned up to being a little bit comical, which let it aspire to being a little bit brave as well. In a project that knew it was small, and felt self-possessed about being small, people saw something that they liked: a reflection of themselves that they wanted to claim. They were up for it. They would welcome a small helping of a glory that was actually compatible with the present-day reality of the nation as the great rollover of the centuries approached. Beagle’s builders kept comparing the size of the craft to a garden barbecue – one of those round ones from B&Q, with a lid. OK, thought the British public. We can see ourselves as the country that put a barbecue on Mars. Tom Wolfe describes in The Right Stuff how the returned Mercury astronauts would see worshipful faces turned towards them, faces softened by awe, faces glistening. When Pillinger presented Beagle, there was laughter, there was surprise, but there was glistening going on too.

  And it worked. In August 1999, Lord Sainsbury, the Minister at the DTI with responsibility for space, announced that the government had discovered another £5 million for Beagle down the back of the national sofa. Beagle became the official centrepiece of UK space policy, the mocked-up pictures of it on the Martian surface lavishly reproduced in New Frontiers, a glossy brochure of British space activities. £5 million plus £2.7 million only came to a third of Beagle’s total price tag, but Pillinger was now confident that with official endorsement he could raise the rest through private sponsorship, which he had been pursuing in parallel.

  He already had promises amounting to £13 million. To the British space companies and technology companies who were Beagle’s suppliers, he pushed the idea of the craft as a showcase, a worthy display window for the best they could do. The Martin-Baker Aircraft Company, quiet owners of a 65 per cent British share in the world market for ejector seats, agreed to supply a design for the parachutes. From the equally British-dominated world of Formula One, another home of bespoke engineering, McLaren took on construction of the honeycombed, carbon-fibre casing of the craft. Logica, an IT company presently getting rich from the software for text messaging on mobile phones, said they would adjust the descent package they had written for the ESA’s Cassini-Huygens mission, and fit it to the task of touchdown on Mars, rather than Titan. Science Systems, a software developer for ESA expanding into business applications, started to write the autonomous control routines for Beagle’s cargo of experiments, working in Ada, the rugged and heavily failsafed language used in the US in cruise missiles. The role of Prime Contractor for Mars Express as a whole had indeed, as hoped, gone to Matra Marconi, now in the process of merging with Daimler-Chrysler Aerospace and becoming Astrium, a pan-European space technology outfit. Astrium France would manage the project, but Astrium UK would be Industrial Prime on Beagle, meaning that it would take over-arching responsibility for the manufacture and design of everything that wrapped around the scientific payload. Astrium would take care of Beagle’s communications, its power supply, its circuitry. Astrium would create the custom-built processor boards on which the software ran. Astrium would step in whenever the design of individual components ran into trouble. It would lead the consortium of committed contractors Colin Pillinger had found.

  To the rest of British business, meanwhile, he made a different pitch. It wasn’t only the beleaguered space industry and the new companies engineering the technology boom who could gain from Beagle. There was something there too to tempt that other kind of British excellence, which showed itself in the high per-capita population of food stylists and made British commercials the most reliably surreal, funny and manipulative in the world. Tens of millions of consumers, Pillinger pointed out, would be sure to be watching as Beagle reached Mars. It would be the focus of intense, sustained, valuable attention. If anyone would care to make sure that their logo was visible on the craft, he was open to offers. Thirty years earlier, it had required a struggle even to get a Union Jack painted on Black Arrow. Now Pillinger was throwing open Beagle to every desire-inducing sigil graphic designers could come up with. If anyone would like to go a step further, and ensure that the object piping a Blur jingle from the Martian surface was known as the Weetabix Beagle 2, or the Tesco Beagle 2, or the Mar-mite Beagle 2 – well, come on down! M&C Saatchi Sponsorship agreed to add Beagle to their client list, alongside Benson & Hedges and NatWest’s credit-card operation. ‘Beagle 2 represents a unique opportunity for businesses and brands,’ said Saatchi’s chief executive in the press release. ‘It combines extraordinary vision, technological brilliance, mass coverage and awareness, and the opportunity to touch the lives of every man, woman and child not just in Britain, but throughout the world.’

  Again, Beagle might not have seemed a specially attractive proposition if Pillinger had pitched it to Saatchi cold. An Open University astrobiology experiment? Guaranteed to thrill the audience of The Sky at Night? On the face of it, not a likely platform for mass appeal. But he had established its popularity. It had been infused with cool, it had been successfully linked to people’s emotions. Advertisers and marketeers know that alongside the conjunctions of product and emotion which they create themselves, there is in addition a mobile surplus of emotion out there, which from time to time mysteriously settles on an object. They respect the arbitrariness of the proc
ess; their task then is to keep up with it, or preferably to keep a little ahead of it. The signs were promising for Beagle. After all, an analogy for sponsoring a spacecraft already existed. You didn’t have to look any further than the source from which Beagle was getting its carbon-fibre expertise. In Formula One, honed technology snagged an audience’s attention, and advertisers swarmed to be where the crowd were looking. In the late 1990s, for example, the Benetton Formula One team – or, to give it its full name, the Mild Seven Benetton Formula One team – plastered its cars with more than twenty-five different logos, from Mild Seven’s own on the nose cone and side panels to decals for Akai Electronics, Korean Airways, Kickers shoes and an Austrian mobile-phone company. Sponsorship earned the team £30 million in 1996. The same could surely happen for Beagle. Pillinger was ready. He knew he would have to labour to make sponsorship follow his agenda and give him what he needed. ‘Nobody should believe that sponsorship or private-sector advertising is some kind of philanthropy,’ he told the MPs on the Select Committee. ‘This is hard-nosed business. The people who want to advertise their brand, their product, their involvement with something as exciting and as aspiring as Beagle 2 want something for their money and they are going to fight very hard to get the best deal they can for the minimum amount of input. I am going to do the opposite. At the end of the day, if I have to – and the Saatchis will help me – I will bargain right to the bottom of the launch tower.’ In boardroom after boardroom, the long day through, Colin Pillinger sold Beagle. From dawn to dewy eve he asked for money.