Oi! Pillinger! No!

[major_clanger]

Space Daily has a rather combative article proposing that it's a good thing for space exploration that Beagle 2 failed.

It's odd to read this so soon after reading the Beagle 2 chapter of Backroom Boys - two utterly contrasting takes on essentially the same facts. Whilst the tone of this article is sure to raise many hackles, a lot of its claims are to a fair extent true - and the comments on the private expectations within the UK space industry re the outcome of the mission certainly tie with what I heard.

MC

Comments

[pmcray.livejournal.com]

Combative is certainly the right word. Actionable is another one that springs to mind. From the style and tone of his article, I suspect that Professor Bell is an entertaining dinner companion. However, Pillinger is a respected scientist (I remember him giving a seminar at QMW back around 1990) and Beagle 2 was an ESA mission. Yes, it was probably never going to work, but how does that different from a large number of previous US missions? It's a perfectly legitimate point to make that shoestring projects are more likely to fail. But Big Science has its problems too - bloated bureaucracy, waste, inefficiency, inflexibility (also true of Big Businesses too, such as, oh, I don't know, Siemens). Perhaps we need a flourishing ecology of different types and sizes of projects.

I also fear that Professor Bell may have fallen for the Oxfordian myth (http://www.shakespeareauthorship.com - a site dedicated to the proposition that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare). A great many Americans do. Michael H. Hart, for instance. See the second edition of The 100 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0806513500/qid=1074078770/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_8_1/026-2758628-4047605). Yes, it's the same Michael H. Hart who wrote "An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrial Life on Earth," Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, 16, 128-135 (1975), perhaps the first paper to argue that the best explanation for Fermi's Paradox is that We Are Alone. I believe he ended up teaching at a community college somewhere.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

It's maybe hindsight, but I don't think it is unfair to say that Backroom Boys was optimistic about Beagle 2. And it then got hyped by the UK media in the run-up to the landing. But Patrick Moore kept fairly quite.

Which suggests media hype.


As for Shakespeare, the BBC series In Search of Shakespeare blows some rather large holes in the alternative Shakespeare business: there was a lot more information about him than was ever mentioned when I was at school.