Backroom Boys

by Francis Spufford

  It should have worked. In a way, it worked enough. On the strength of Beagle’s sponsorship potential, it was possible to raise a loan that kept construction underway, both the scientific construction in Milton Keynes and Leicester, and the engineering effort at Astrium and its partner companies. An intricately miniaturised biology lab and a complete descent system had to mesh together inside the craft’s one-metre diametre shell like the cogs and gears inside a fob watch.

  Unfortunately, though, there is no rule guaranteeing that when you sell advertising space on your soul, you get the price you were hoping for: or any price at all. The price of a soul is sometimes zero, especially if you bring it to market just as a global bubble bursts. Sponsorship spending is discretionary spending, by definition, and if times get abruptly harder, it’s the discretionary spending that companies cut first. Goodbye the season at the English National Opera, goodbye the marquees and the strawberries, goodbye the charming little mission to Mars. As the world’s stock markets collapsed in the spring of 2000, and then went on deflating and deflating as more and more optimism hissed away, the promises Pillinger had received from the commercial sponsors, as opposed to the space industry, started to disappear. By the autumn of 2000, it was clear that Beagle was not going to fly to Mars like a champagne cork, propelled by the gases of British corporate good cheer. Despite everything M&C Saatchi could do, no-one would pay to send their logo to Mars. Thus there was going to be a major shortfall in the budget. The Beagle team was forced to apply to ESA’s central funds for help. The agency’s Director of Scientific Programmes commissioned an independent review of Beagle’s feasibility from John Casani of NASA. He was a formidable choice, the troubleshooter who’d led the enquiry into the previous year’s American Mars disaster, when the software aboard the Mars Polar Lander turned off its descent motor 40 metres above the surface, dropping it onto the red rocks with just enough of a tinkling crash to ensure that it was never heard from again. Casani reported that the Beagle mission was ‘eminently doable’, but in danger of dropping out of the Mars Express timetable unless something was done quickly. ESA, of course, wanted Mars Express to fly without Beagle as little as Beagle’s creators did – and the British government, by now too committed to Beagle to allow it to fail, endorsed the request as strongly as it could. In November 2000, ESA’s Science Programme Committee announced that it would stump up €20m, or £14m: half Beagle’s total cost. The amount that actually reached Beagle was rather less, thanks to ESA’s overheads, but that, plus PPARC’s £2.7m, plus the government’s £5m, plus the space industry donations, would see Beagle’s tightly-packed box of tricks safely aboard the Soyuz when it lifted off from Baikonur on schedule, in May of 2003. So in the end Beagle was a compromise, owing something to the tenacity of British scientists, something to the susceptibility of New Labour, only a little to the glossy alchemy of British advertising, and much more to a deep-pocketed generosity Britain had foresworn, when it came to space. As the twentieth century ended and the twenty-first began, that was the combination you needed, to get something like Beagle done.

  Over the winter of 2002–3, Astrium in Stevenage passed finished systems and components to Milton Keynes, where the craft was being assembled in a clean room at the Open University. Beagle was assembled in Milton Keynes, and when it was complete, it was transported to Astrium in Toulouse to be mated to the rest of Mars Express. But an elegant irony of industrial genealogy still remained. Astrium UK had been begotten of Matra Marconi. Matra Marconi had been begotten of British Aerospace. BAe had been begotten of Hawker Siddeley. And Hawker Siddeley, long ago, had been begotten of the De Havilland Aircraft Company, sculptors in steel and aluminium. Many of the pieces of Beagle 2 began their journey to Mars in the same facility where, once upon a time, De Havilland had crafted the elegant deadliness of Blue Streak.

  *

  Just before three o’clock in the morning of Christmas Day, 2003, in the stillness before even the most hyperactive children in Britain have crept downstairs to investigate the presents under the tree, and no-one is awake to watch the fairy lights shining amid the green pine needles, an early gift will turn up. An object will appear in the Martian sky. No dust storm will be blowing down below, and the little spinning craft will mass only 69 kilos, a twentieth as much as the Soviet Union’s diving bell did. But on it will come. On it will come, slanting towards the rusty face of the planet at 20,000 kilometres per hour, coming in from the north-west in the same direction that Mars is turning, so that it closes gradually with its destination in Isidis. The first molecules of carbon dioxide will bash the heat shield, then a storm of them. Beagle will glow, it will burn, as it streaks over the giant volcanoes of Tharsis, and onwards south-east across Elysium, the land below a thesaurus-beating anthology of red shades, plum and cochineal, ochre and cerise. Forces of 15g will be acting on the little fireball as it comes; fifteen times the ordinary force of Earth’s gravity. Sound will return, missing ever since Mars Express left the ground in Kazakhstan. Beagle’s passing will reverberate in the Martian sky. It will drag a sonic boom behind it from one side of the pink heavens to the other, a roar eerier and more etherial than Concorde’s.

  But in the heart of the meteor, in the core of the roar, the wakeful software running on the bespoke circuit board will count, smooth, estimate, judge, as calmly as a ticking casement clock in a quiet room. It will weigh the input from the three onboard accelerometers, it will adjust according to the last-minute forecasts for the Martian atmosphere that were downloaded into it just before it separated from Mars Express. If the accelerometers disagree, it will take a majority vote from the three inputs. Lines of rugged Ada flickering by as fast as they do in the guidance computer of a cruise missile, it will run the ever-changing data it is getting through an algorithm that relates together height, speed, drag, angle of attack and atmospheric pressure. It will be waiting for the fire to die back, for the furnace glow on the heatshield to fade. It will be looking for the best sign it can get that Beagle has braked to 1600 kilometres per hour, and is ready for the first parachute to give it a controlled passage through the turbulent domain of speed around Mach 1. (That’s Mach 1 as the speed of sound is calculated in the thinner atmosphere of Mars.) Too soon, and the ‘chute will rip away; too late, and Beagle will have started to tumble irretrievably, the gyroscoping effects of its spin no longer enough to keep it stable, now that aerodynamics have kicked in. The whole blazing descent till this point will have lasted only about three minutes. There will be one chance and just one chance, impossible to recall if wrongly expended, to initiate the next stage of the fall. All alone, very far from Logica’s Space Division in Cobham, Beagle’s software will declare T-zero. A mortar will fire, and the pilot ’chute will be dragged to its full extent in an instant in the roaring slipstream.

  From here on, one of two things will happen. It may well be that something goes wrong. There are enough candidates, if you consider the flowchart of events that has to be negotiated. If any element in the logic of the descent fails, they all fail. Then, the whole investment of time and tenacity in Beagle will go hurling on down, unbraked or inadequately braked, to shatter on the rocks of Isidis, to end in a brief plume of dust. In that case, all that the scientists waiting with fingers crossed in Milton Keynes will ever hear, is silence. Or it may be that the pilot ’chute will stream out cleanly, and impart just its calculated increment of drag before tugging free; and the main ’chute will flower out just as it should, as the explosive bolts fire to detach the heatshield and the top cover. Then, in sudden hush, Beagle will be hanging beneath a wide canopy, closing with the ground at only 60 kilometres per hour, so slowly compared to the first mad rush of the fall that it seems to halt altogether, and to be floating there like thistledown, in the thin high whistling of the Martian breeze, while the red lines and planes of a new world wheel by below. Down it will glide, down until the ridges on the horizon stand higher than it is, down and down onto the soil of Isidis. About two hundred metres up, a unique lig
htweight altimeter in the lower skin of the craft will bounce a radar pulse off the ground, and get an answer it likes. The airbags will puff up to beachball fatness, and Beagle will hit the cinnamon sands with an elastic bounce. A wild arc back into the air; a smaller hop; a slow roll down a gentle incline; standstill. A pause. The bags disengage. Beagle’s shell is unharmed. Cautiously, its lid opens. A British suitcase is on Mars.

  Epilogue

  On Christmas Day 2003, Beagle 2 was launched towards the Martian atmosphere as planned, and was never heard from again. It failed to reach the surface successfully, like three in four of all the landers ever sent to Mars, a proportion which refused to alter just because Beagle was the one and only British chance at the planet for the foreseeable future. Beagle’s bad luck was cruelly counterpointed by the good luck of NASA, whose two rovers Spirit and Opportunity both touched down intact, and spent the spring of 2004 rolling across red plains, pausing by ancient shorelines, and relaying rich data. But then NASA had paid for its good luck by persisting through its string of previous failures. In Milton Keynes, instead of analysing results Colin Pillinger answered press questions, with a stoical good humour modulating gradually into sadness. The silence from Beagle was total: it had not been designed to broadcast telemetry during its descent, so nobody could determine exactly when or how things had gone wrong. The cameras on the main Mars Express orbiter overhead searched in vain for any crash debris or impact traces in Isidis. Whether the parachute was to blame, or the heatshield, or the airbags, or the descent software, or some other unsuspected defect altogether, no one could tell. It was a mystery where the British suitcase had burst. In space industry circles, post-mortem muttering was heard to the effect that Beagle’s weight budget had been too remorselessly spent upon science. A bigger share of the package for the descent systems, it was said, might have ensured that a smaller set of experiments actually arrived in one bit. Perhaps Beagle had tried to do too much at once. Perhaps its design had been too much constrained by the desperate need to get results on the cheap, and so Beagle had fallen into the old penny-wise, pound-foolish trap. Or perhaps the truth is, that to beat the probabilities that govern falls from orbit half a solar-system away, interplanetary exploration needs to be conducted as a campaign, not as a brilliant one-off. In the spring of 2004, Colin Pillinger could be seen cracking his knuckles, stretching his hamstrings, and generally limbering up for another round of public persuasion in Britain. But whether disappointment over Beagle 2 could be converted into demand for Beagle 3 was not at all clear.

  Meanwhile, the work went on. Small British videogame developers closed in unprecedented numbers as the industry centralised, but GTA Vice City, a work of 80s-themed pastel mayhem by Rock-star North of Edinburgh, became a global bestseller. John Sulston joined Oxfam’s campaign for reform of the world’s intellectual property laws. Vodafone prepared for a cautious transition onward from GSM to the next generation of its networks. The roaring, snorting, all-American Champ Car Racing series of the United States continued to buy almost all of its vehicles from Lola Cars of Huntingdon. The Cambridge company Autonomy sold data-management tools based on the statistical theories of an eighteenth-century clergyman from Tonbridge Wells. The idiosyncratic artificial-life pioneer Steve Grand taught a robot orangutang called Lucy to recognise a banana.

  The work went on; usually neither glamorous nor eyecatching, unsupplied by new engineers in large enough quantities, frequently unrewarded, yet to those who laboured with deep, narrow focus to make this thing or that thing work, profoundly satisfying.

  Acknowledgements

  My biggest debt is to everyone who consented to be interviewed for this book and submitted with good humour to the strange process of becoming a character in a story, with all the simplifications and stylisations which that entails. Because each of the six chapters draws on a different discipline, when the interviewees met me I was almost always at an early stage in understanding the area of science that had constituted their life’s work. They answered ignorant questions patiently and pointed me in the direction of better ones. Many of them also read the manuscript of the chapter they appear in and saved me from grotesque errors. Some of the suggestions they made, which would have improved the science or the factual depth of the book, I rejected on wholly unscientific grounds to do with the efficiencies of storytelling. The blame for the results rests with me, as does the blame for all the remaining errors. In particular, for taking time beyond the call of duty, I’d like to thank Derek Mack, Chris Jordan, John Sulston, and Bruce MacTavish, who wished me to give due recognition to his DTI colleague John McEnery, inventor of Concorde’s 80/20 profit-sharing formula. I did not do so in the text; I do so here, with apologies.

  This book began with a commission from Radio 4 to make a thirty-minute documentary about Black Arrow, broadcast on 24 July 1999 under the title of ‘Spitfires to Other Planets’. I’m grateful to the BBC for allowing me to reuse this material. Chapter 1 first appeared, in slightly different form, as the essay ‘Operation Backfire’ in the London Review of Books, vol. 21, no. 21. Chapter 2 was first published as ‘Love that Bird’ in the London Review of Books, vol. 24, no. 11. I’m grateful to Mary-Kay Wilmers and Paul Laity both for wanting the essays and for permission to repurpose them here.

  Simon Coates, my producer at the BBC, taught me how to breathe for radio and demonstrated the wily use of a small budget. Dave Wright and Nick Hill, the twin keys to the world of British rocket history, unlocked it for me. Matt Parton suggested I look at the human genome project. Andrew Brown gave me a vital sneak preview of his worm book. Marina Benjamin and Greg Klerkx made writing about rockets seem sensible. Jenny Uglow, Jenny Turner, Edmund de Waal, Sue Chandler and David Sexton were friends indeed. Jacob Teltscher Loose was delightful (and still is). My parents Peter and Margaret Spufford listened to me when I was stuck and read chunks of the text with reassuring pleasure. Nancy Spufford, my grandmother, drank coffee with me under palm trees. My daughter Stella Martin supplied musical advice and an authentic mobile-phone conversation. Jessica Martin read me, talked to me, endured me and lent me powers I lack. At Faber, my editor Julian Loose walked me through from idea to book, unperturbed for the third time. My agent Clare Alexander made it possible for me to write the book in an unusual state of financial comfort.

  Lastly, for the use of research facilities without which the book would have been impossible, I must thank the librarians of the British Library’s Science & Official Publications departments and of the Institute of Electrical Engineers.

  Sources & Further Reading

  1 FLYING SPITFIRES TO OTHER PLANETS

  Author’s interview with Roy Dommett, 13 August 1998

  Author’s interview with John Scott-Scott, 11 August 1998

  Author’s interview with David Andrews, 11 August 1998

  Author’s interview with Jim Scragg, 21 July 1998

  Author’s interviews with Derek Mack, 12 August 1998, 7 September 1998

  Letter to author from Derek Mack, 9 August 1998

  Author’s interview with Iain Peattie, 28 July 1998

  Author’s interview with Kenneth Warren, 23 September 1998

  Author’s interview with Stephen Baxter, 22 October 1998

  Author’s interview with Dave Wright, 28 September 1998

  ‘A New Process for Hydrogen Peroxide’, The Industrial Chemist, January 1959

  David Andrews, ‘The Industrial History of the Ansty Rocket Department 1946–1971’, 26 July 1998

  Dave Wright and Nicholas Hill, ‘What Went Wrong with Dan Dare?’, History Today, July 1999

  Peter Morton, Fire Across the Desert: Woomera and the Anglo-Australian Joint Project 1946–80, Australian Government Publishing Service (Canberra), 1989

  Saunders-Roe ‘Black Knight’ film, c/o ART Film and Video Library, Perivale, Middlesex

  John Krige, The Launch of ELDO, ESA Publications (Noorwijk, Netherlands), 199x

  House of Commons, Fifth Report from the Select Committee on Sci
ence and Technology, Session 1970–71: United Kingdom Space Activities, HMSO (London), 27 October 1971

  ‘British Rocket Development’, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 45, no. 4, April 1992

  Archie and Nan Clow, Science News 48: Rocket and Satellite Research Number, Penguin (Harmondsworth), 1958

  Arthur C. Clarke, Astounding Days: A Science Fictional Autobiography, Gollancz (London), 1989

  Sir Harrie Massey and M. O. Robins, The History of British Space Science, Cambridge University Press, 1986

  Hugh Walters, Blast Off at Woomera, Faber and Faber (London), 1957

  Ivan Southall, Woomera, Angus & Robertson (Sydney), 1962

  ‘Memories of Black Arrow’, at homepage.powerup.com.au/~woomera/bkarrow.htm

  Further reading: C. N. Hill, A Vertical Empire: The History of the UK Rocket and Space Programme, 1950–1971, Imperial College Press (London), 2001; Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux (New York), 1979; Stephen Baxter and Simon Bradshaw, ‘Prospero One’ (science fiction story), Interzone 112, October 1996

  2 FASTER THAN A SPEEDING BULLET

  Author’s interview with Brian Trubshaw, December 2000

  Author’s phone interview with Bruce McTavish, April 2001

  House of Commons, Second Report from the Industry and Trade Committee, Session 1981–82: Concorde, HMSO (London), 10 February 1982