Florence ate it.

I knew it. The terrorists have won.

But that article has a great headline - not the Fark headline, the real one.

gotta love jack higgins

I think Charlie Brown took it and out it to sleep.

Every good dog person knows that, when let off the leash, Beagles wander off for months. Don't worry, he'll come back when he gets hungry.

If this was a story about a NASA probe then it would already be a flamewar about the budget not being used for useful stuff like making making a welfare state

Marvin the Martian accused of being a terrorist in 4...3...2...

Good Grief.

Maybe it was eaten by Princess Anne's pooch.

Uh... Marvin the Martian WAS a terrorist. Thank God for special ops Bugs Bunny, otherwise the Earth would be destroyed.

On the basis that they've mistakenly dropped it into a huuuuge crater - which somehow they managed to miss before and thought the landing site was perfectly flat - it's pretty much a dead loss. Shame really though, I watched something on TV a while back about the processes that went into sorting this out, and it was pretty cool stuff.

On to Beagle3 then I 'spose.

I know who it was!!!

Batboy ate it

(If you read Weekly World News, you know what I mean)

RINGO STARR IS MISSING?? Oh wait..

Look, it set out to find life on Mars, and its failure to transmit a signal has proved to me there is life on the Red Planet. Beagle 2 landed, and some Martian kid smashed it to shiat with a hammer. A Martian hammer, which is green and cooler than Earth hammers.
/I want to believe

rhiannon-
Don't you know we're part of Generation X. I got bored two days ago. Where's my Ritalin?

Maybe, next time they'll send a skutter instead?

Skutter

Shoulda sent...

To this day I do not understand why the various space agencies don't keep this stuff quiet.....

Manager:Hey Brad.
Brad the Space Modulator Watcher Guy:Wats up, Bill.
Manager:Just checked the telem, seems our project may have......
Brad:Everything is fine, Bill.
Manager:Yeah, but the timeframe for contact was...
Brad:EVERYTHING IS FINE, BILL. GO PLAY MISSLE COMMAND.
Manager:Okeydoke.

The NASA rovers will probably go off course and smash into it on landing...or is that what you meant by 'jump-start'?

Publikwerks-
We don't do Metric.

I got it!!

It's the machines master plan! If we launch enough robots up there, they can start building their armies in complete secrecy! Stop sending more worker robots to Mars!!

ahem...

I for one would like to welcome our new robotic overlords to the year 2004.

Publikwerks Yet.

It;s not just OUR rover! The robots are working together. They don't have communist or conservatives, right wingers or left wingers. They are all coming together on Mars to kill us.

Except the liberal robots. They just get made fun of.

TheOther:

I think NASA has a pretty good track record when it comes to Mars, not that there is anything wrong with the ESA.....

Just leave it to the experts.

WHY DON'T YOU PEOPLE GET IT?!

Nasa wants us all dead!
Nasa sent up monkeys. Are they all accounted for?
Nasa sent up robots. Where are they now?

"We can defeat the monkeys. We can defeat the robots.
BUT NOT AT THE SAME TIME!!!"
- Lewis Black

Publikwerks, PottyMcNugg I will be delighted to eat crow on Saturday if the probes reach the surface safely and operate as they should. There is nothing I would like better. NASA's recent record on landings is weak.

/Columbia

No matter what happens with Beagle, it was glorious and superior to anything the US does/has done; just ask The Guardian.

Can't we all just hope that human space missions are sucessful? Sheeeesh. Tribalism won't leave us I guess.

Me too! I welcome our new robotic overlords to the year 2004.
What a Great day!

rudaydong,

Yup, the Brits managed to crash land on mars cheaper than anyone else.

"The second I heard, the first time, that they were having problems locating it... I knew it was gone..."

Yeah, they probably know too (despite what they say). But you don't send what has to be a several million dollar mission to a foreign planet and give up after a day or two trying.

DarthBrooks: very funny.

My daughter just took her beagle out for a walk......



~got nuthin'

All your Beagles are belong to us.

my balls itch.

Try scratchin' em?

Don't scratch, wash.


Bad Dog! Bad Dog!

The guy who wrote the Guardian article is an astronomer. He was talking from a technical point of view, rather than a nationalistic/competative one.

All he's doing is reflecting the general opinion of the worldwide scientific community.

It's a long standing debate within the American space programmes as well, and many (if not most) of your scientists think exactly the same thing as the writer...that sending people into space is not as cost effective as sending machines.

Sending men is in large part a PR excercise, and the money spent on that could be of greater benefit to science if it was spent on unmanned missions instead.

But of course, these decisions are made by politicians, not scientists, just as they are in all countries.

Note that he (Sir Martin Rees) says quote "space exploration is.. perceived as 'what NASA does'. This perception is...valid" and " the European Space Agency...cannot match the scale and range of NASA's activities." unquote.

That pretty much kills the theory that he's saying Beagle is "glorious and superior to anything the US has done";and rightly so, because it would obviously be completely ridiculous to suggest that this is the case in any single facet of history or the human experience.