Re: Top Bloke
Beagle almost didn't make it onto the mission. As it was, it had a wodge of cash thrown at the last minute, but it was far too late to make much difference.
The same airbags used for testing (patched, strengthened and overweight) were sent to Mars. This is a very bad thing(*). There simply wasn't enough money to make new ones or enough time when the money finally did appear.
(*)Anything tested outdoors absorbs water vapour, which is bloody near impossble to remove afterwards, and in the temperatures of space it's not just ice, but may as well be granite.
The airbags were placed in a large vacuum chamber and pumped down to remove as much water as possible, but they were still outgassing after 6-8 weeks when they had to be integrated into the payload (there was so much water in them they were clogging the pumps for the first 2 weeks)
It's highly likely that Beagle made it all the way to the surface, but the airbags simply didn't/couldn't inflate properly because they were a frozen mass and the thing went *splat*
A properly funded mission would probably be a sucess and Beagle is actually cheap/small enough that a funded organisation could send a dozen to Mars at once (That would spread the risk. Perhaps one might die, but not all 12).
Beagle, like Prospero stands as testimony to the monumental shortsightedness of british govt beaurecracy. As far as they're concerned all this stuff is simply a "flag waving exercise" with low exposure.
They're more than happy to jump on the bandwagon if someone makes a discovery but getting funding is somewhere between difficult-to-impossble. Of the EU nations who put money into space, the UK spends the least of all - and given ESA investment/contracting rules (contracts are awarded in value proportional to the payments made by each country), it's a self-reinforcing cycle as top up-and-coming british space scientitsts bugger off to other countries where they can be assured they'll keep being able to both put food on the table AND do research.
One of the newspapers made a big fuss about the British space program/industry employing 30,000 people nationwide (Which is a highly optimistic figure and must include the cleaners as well as all the contractors making parts at workshops across trhe country). To put that into perspective, Australia has more people involved in space and there are more people than that working at NASA JPL alone.