things that has been a philosophy of life for me has been if somebody offers you the chance to do something, don’t refuse because it might go wrong. So what? If you don’t do it, there’ll always be the chance you’ll think, ‘I should have done that.’ I never wanted to be in that position.” For Beagle 2, Pillinger drew on all aspects of his scientific background. “I didn’t build the thing myself,” he explains, “I was just the pied piper.” But as the project’s figurehead and inspiration, he has a lot in common with a generation of British scientists and engineers from the past – men who weren’t afraid to dream big, like Isambard Kingdom Brunel. “‘Last of the Victorian scientists’ is what I’ve been called,” he laughs. “There are still a few around in Britain. You’ve got your [James] Dysons and you’ve got the guy who broke the land speed record [Richard Noble] but they are few and far between because projects like this are so huge. You can’t really be a one-man team building a Typhoon Fighter.” There’s an even more irresistible label, one that’s often applied to a certain kind of British scientist: ‘eccentric’. “That’s just one of the fun things about being a professor,” Pillinger says. “When you become a professor you’re immediately classed as being slightly off the plot. There are people of other nationalities who are just as bad as us, but we have more than our fair share. Some people get bees in their bonnet about something, and I suppose the British are just quite good at it.” Despite his recent focus on the moon, you can tell that Mars is still firmly embedded in Pillinger’s mind. He’s particularly frustrated with the delays in getting another probe back there to look for life. “Everything we did on Beagle 2 could be done again
now, and it could still be done now if somebody could give us the go ahead,” he says. “It would be like getting the Magnificent Seven back together. If I was to write an announcement saying we were going to do it, everyone involved would be back. I don’t doubt for a second they would.” That determination to stick to his guns has seen Pillinger get closer and closer to sending another probe – but not until 2018. “We’re going to combine with NASA and go then, but the problem is there are too many other countries involved. We could have gone straight back to Mars in 2007 for a fraction of the money if there had been one country organising it. That was Britain’s fault. It’s the usual story: we invent something and we don’t follow up on it. We invent the hovercraft, we invent Concord, but we don’t follow up.” You won’t find Pillinger feeling sorry for himself, however. He will go about his business until he finds himself vindicated and proves that there is or once was life on Mars. But even if he is to be proved right, don’t expect anything Spielbergian about the extraterrestrial life he hopes to find. “I don’t think of science in terms of science-fiction,” he says. “I have a very strong suspicion that if you find life on Mars, it will be different, but not in the same way that Darwin discovered. Darwin knew about life in Europe and by going around the world he found life that was basically the same but subtly different. My view of life is that it was not a unique accident on Earth.” Colin Pillinger’s autobiography, My Life on Mars: The Beagle 2 Diaries, is available now, published by the British Interplanetary Society.
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