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t 67, with wild untamed sideburns and a thick Bristolian drawl, Colin pillinger wouldn’t look out of place propping up the bar in a West Country pub. But pillinger is no ruddy-faced bar fly; he’s the man who, in 2003, coordinated a shoestring budget, media attention and celebrity support to launch the Beagle 2, a British-led craft tasked with answering the most pertinent question about our galaxy: is there life on Mars? With the nation behind him, pillinger was supposed to make contact with Beagle 2 on the surface of Mars on Christmas Day, 2003. However, it was with a mounting sense of disappointment that attempts to reach the probe by radio transmission proved unsuccessful. Exactly what went wrong remains a mystery to this day, as does the question of whether or not life exists on Mars. As Blur guitarist Alex James (who, along with Damien Hirst, was one of the more unlikely celebrity champions of the project) puts it in his autobiography, ‘Beagle was a triumph of aspiration, if not a victory for science.’
042 T h e A t t a c k t h e B l o c k I s s u e