The ill-fated Beagle 2 Mars probe project was doomed from the start, says a UK parliamentary committee report released last week.
It says the £50 million ($9 million) project had an "over-ambitious time schedule, punishing weight constraints, poor management and uncertain funding".
Beagle 2 was supposed to have landed on Mars on Christmas Day 2003 to look for signs of life, but nothing was heard from the probe after it left the Mars Express orbiter a few days earlier.
Committee chairman Edward Leigh said during a recent radio interview: "You probably think we're just boring bean-counters but it is public money and we are spending a lot of money on this and frankly the Beagle 2 project failed."
But UK Open University planetary scientist Professor Colin Pillinger, who proposed the Beagle 2 project, says: "We had some of the best managers in the world, both from Astrium and the British National Space Centre.
"The truth is that doing this type of work is bloody difficult and we tried our best to get it to work, but there are always risks. I think it's time we moved on to discuss how we can recover the scientific research opportunities that were lost with Beagle 2."
Source: Flight Daily News
