My life on March: Beagle 2 newspapers by Colin Pillinger - review | Tim Radford (guardian)

Beagle 2 as it should have looked on the surface of March. Colin Pillinger and his team have waited in vain for his signal. Photo: PA

Beagle 2 history is so extraordinary that a bad book on adventure would be useful to review, and this is not a bad book. Review the initial conditions. In the 1960s, the British were as excited as anyone by the Apollo program and slow exploration of distant planets. But in 1971 a British satellite ascended on a rocket British (black arrow) and it is the end of the adventure. Scientists from the University of Colombia-British clung to space research deals with the military or the Nasa contracts or by joining the European Space Agency, teams and even these connections expected precarious during the years of Thatcherism, when Ministers science budgets slashed, closed laboratories and picked fighting with Europe.

And then, apparently from nowhere, Professor Colin Pillinger, Open University, a member the bizarre brigade, shamelessly promote a British Lander grafted on a European orbiter, parachute into March spring open, burrow into the Martian rock, sniff out evidence of past life and his discoveries in Great Britain relay.

Beagle 2 (echo Darwin's grand voyage was deliberate) should be small enough to stowaway to Mars Express. Camera, microscope, arm robot, drilling, communication and power supply were within the space occupied by a couple of dustbin lids struck together and still leave a box value shoe room for gas chromatography and mass spectrometry.

Necessary initial million would be generated from private sources (at this stage, the British Government always behaved as if there could be nothing of value for Great Britain in space) and the reluctant European hierarchy should be persuaded fly little impertinent passenger. Pillinger made happen through a mixture of tenacity, personality, industry performance and scientific imagination flair. It involves the fuzzy band (which includes the call sign) and Damian Hirst (spots on the map of the camera instrument calibration) artist and manipulate the media with great verve. He also co-opted industry reinvigorated scientific colleagues convinced politicians that they must change their mind and that he met phenomenal tight timelines. And all Beagle 2 has worked until this silence poignant 2003 Christmas day when the small dog on March does not signal the arrival of the bark.

It's a long story, but you could probably say the idea of Beagle 2 was born of a confrontation, six years earlier to a meeting of the ESA in Paris when someone "impenetrable clique" became the Pillinger (had more or less of the meeting) and said "who will construct a lander?" Steps to you. Who will pay? Not the Brits. "That challenge was probably everything had to be: on the way back Colin and his wife Judith had decided at the mission and begun work hard to make happen.

This follow-up were endless meetings and clashes with dubious academics, reluctant bureaucrats, dismissive of officials, Ministers, skepticism of dubious industrialists and unnecessary Europeans, who had to be satisfied. Of course, there are also some nostalgic allies and even enthusiastic, and that sometimes are the same people. Character key in the space community has categorically, there was no money for a mission in March before adding: "I cannot say allows you to move forward, but then I can't tell you not to do."

People who did not know should be persuaded care, people who had to make believe, and people who want to contribute preserved in the inclination of the project. European bureaucracy should be pushed into the space on board Mars Express, and then scientific Beagle and engineers had to find ways to meet more ruthless mass and space constraints and work then how landing mission safely, while on the other hand the desperate times.

At the end is disappointment. More than half of all March missions lost on launch or orbiting platform reaches or March. Had Beagle 2 has survived on landing, Pillinger was a national hero. He found chemical evidence of Martian life (and Beagle 2 remains potentially the best blow so far) he became an international superstar.

Anyway, it remains a hero. He had a go. He started March on the map for millions. Yes, is a costly loss, but not expensive measured in premiums of bankers, not to mention the bankers blunders. And now he has written a book which tells the whole story, "the really bad guys" and vouchers which helped to all. This is a book to be buying? Oh yes, if you are buff space, a member of the scientific community space British, a supporter of Beagle 2, or if you were there at the time.

This is a good book? It is well written and frolicking. "Space agencies as paper missions: that they hang work instruments, there is no parasites of the computer, they are good markets, politicians do scrap program, etc. etc....". "the sentence is vintage Pillinger: crisp, sardonic and brilliantly clear." What lets it down are the and ceteras. And this is what may discourage some readers. My life on March family memoir, biography, a window of class war, a chronicle of space science and account describes a great campaign and sometimes the strands of narrative scrimmage against each other. Chapters that said-what-de-who provide startling insight into exhausting to obtain a mission beyond the atmosphere realities, but they could be too taxing for the reader.

Neither the author can withstand distracting detail. "On page 40 his colleague James" had a "Viva Zapata" bushy and much smoked. Yes? And? On page 42, our hero visits James Lovelock on Salisbury Plain and learns that "to fly an instrument on a mission to March you may need to be intelligent and simple" but waives the momentum and direction of such a sentence with a detour on the difficulty of obtaining home again in a fog. I am all the detail (what young Pillinger preferred "no surprise" television series Maverick to Wagon Train is a nice augury of the scientist to come), but sometimes digressions threaten to seize history.

The last chapter ("God protect me from my friends") describes in detail the infighting, complaining and bitterness that followed the loss of Beagle 2. It is aggressive and rhythmic supporter, but inform the testimony.

This is a book that says it all. Literature, its weakness is that he said everything. But, of course, the historians of British Colombia's space effort to anyone interested in the madness of bureaucracy, for connoisseurs of art of doing things to happen and people excited about Beagle 2, dynamic that is exactly what it will be so valuable.