Posted on 12/29/2003 7:09:31 PM PST by Pikamax
Sweet smell of failure
That rugby business confused things for a while, but now the stubbornly silent Mars probe Beagle 2 has reminded us what Britain does best: heroic failure. And Stuart Jeffries, for one, is grateful
Tuesday December 30, 2003 The Guardian
Four reasons have been given to explain why the Beagle 2 hasn't sent a signal from Mars. One: it is possible that a computer glitch may have affected transmission timings. Sounds plausible. Two: the probe has a misaligned or obstructed antenna, which thwarted the Beagle from cheering us up with interplanetary signals during the bleak midwinter. Quite possible, if you think about it. Three: there was some catastrophic systems failure during landing. You can see how that could come about. Four: maybe the Beagle made it down, but is in a crater or tilting badly. This sounds the most likely. These are all good reasons, and any one of them might account for why the probe failed. Instead of phoning home like a good extraterrestrial on Christmas Day, the Beagle snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. But there is a fifth possible reason that none of the experts has considered. It is that the Beagle is British. The Beagle's mission may have been to boldly go where Nasa probes had been before, but let's put that aside for the moment. If there's one thing the British know how to snatch it is defeat and, unerringly, they know where to snatch it from. Britain is a place where trains are cancelled because of such apparently unforeseeable things as snow or leaves; where one of our greatest living sailors (Tony Bullimore) is revered as Captain Calamity; where our leading contribution to the sport of skiing is a man (Eddie the Eagle) who, were he sitting next to you on the bus, might prompt you to get off a few stops earlier than usual; where Alfred the Great let some cakes burn and thus ushered in Britain's virtuoso contribution to world cuisine.
Britain is a land that, when it comes right down to it, is a bit rubbish. The playwright Patrick Marber noted as much when in his play Closer he had one of his characters consider the carpet at Heathrow airport. How could Britain deserve to be taken seriously when the first experience of the place it offered foreigners was the mankiest flooring in Christendom or beyond? It is a place whose devotion to failure is symbolised clearly by its commitment to missing penalties: even when English footballer Stuart Pearce achieved psychic closure at Euro 96 by sticking the ball in the onion bag, shortly afterwards Gareth Southgate reopened newly closed wounds by missing the large net thing a few yards in front of him. Why hasn't the Beagle sent a signal? Because it is British, and because Mars has the wrong kind of clay on its surface. Terribly rich in iron, you see, completely unsuitable for Martian probe landings. British ones, at least.
You may think that you get off the hook because you're Scottish or Welsh. Failure is the English disease, isn't it? Sadly not: to be Scottish, for instance, is to be like the English in terms of failure only more so. Thus, in Irvine Welsh's novel Trainspotting, Renton makes the following point: "Some people hate the English, but I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonised by wankers. We can't even pick a decent culture to be colonised by. We are ruled by effete arseholes." The Welsh suffer just as much from colonisation by nearby Wankeria, as do those Irish people who have the misfortune to live under England's post-imperial yoke. Indeed, one might well argue that the ability of the effete English nation to colonise anybody is the exception that proves the rule, a rare historical example of Britain transcending its historical destiny.
"Oh really! Come on!" I hear you cry. "I mean, think of Jonny and the boys. Doesn't that remarkable triumph over one of the greatest winning machines in sporting history (Australia) signify that one of the greatest losing machines in said history (England) is emerging in to a bright new future?" It's a good question and one that I can best answer by saying: no, it doesn't. Consider the dreary ineptitude of Chris Tarrant's TV paean to that team, We Are the Champions - The Nation Celebrates on ITV. Britain is a failure at celebrating success, arguably because we are temperamentally ill-inclined to be anything but good losers and are lavish celebrants only of defeats (hence those items of national history you've been expecting to come across for some paragraphs now, namely Dunkirk, the Charge of the Light Brigade and Scott's race against Amundsen).
With the failure of the Beagle 2, one might argue, normal service has been resumed. Britain is back where it likes to be, failing and meticulously analysing that failure. Whole British industries are devoted to this analysis. One of the great postwar British industries is the sitcom, and that industry's greatest products are failures. Basil Fawlty, Del Boy Trotter, Harold (and possibly Albert) Steptoe, Rab C Nesbitt, Frank Spencer, the characters of Dad's Army and Are You Being Served, David Brent and Alan Partridge are all ground-down anti-heroes whose role is to remind the British, reassuringly, of themselves, to confirm what we all know - that we suffer from a British Leyland of the soul.
Perhaps, though, the story is more complicated than this. Perhaps, for every British failure there is a corresponding success. Consider one of the great failures of recent public life in Britain, namely rail transport. Before that was a failure, it was a British success thanks to George Stephenson who, in a very real sense, invented the thing. Rail transport was quite a success for a while - but then there was a very British coup. Let's select just two examples from rail transport's troubled history to clinch that point, and not even mention how long it has taken Eurostar to get up to speed on the British side of the Channel Tunnel. In 1981, British Rail launched its successor to the Rocket, called the Advanced Passenger Train, which swerved so dramatically that it made a trainload of VIPs sick on a demonstration run, a sensation made worse by the gallons of free hooch they had consumed before they approached the first bend. Nicknamed the "queasy rider", the APT was scrapped four years later. No matter. Two decades later, Richard Branson bought a fleet of £11m Italian-built Pendolino tilting trains to trim journey times on the west coast mainline so that trips between London and Manchester would be 38 minutes shorter and those between London and Birmingham 17 minutes less. The problem is that the British track isn't ready for these Pendolinos: only 17 miles of track (between Rugby and Atherstone) is currently capable of serving these state-of-the-art trains and replacement work is more than a year behind schedule. Worse yet, some passengers on Pendolino test drives have complained of vibrations that turned their stomachs.
Then there is our glorious record in martial matters. Before we waded into Iraq, Tony Blair praised the professionalism of the British armed forces. "There is no greater strength for a British prime minister and the British nation at a time like this to know that those forces are among the best in the world," he said. What a success story! No matter that it was the British army that bought 67 Apache helicopters which could not fire their Hellfire anti-tank missiles because debris from the weapon system could hit rotor blades and thus cause the aircraft to crash. No matter that the SA80 rifle, developed by Royal Ordnance and anticipated as a breakthrough assault weapon that would be the best of its kind in the world, jammed repeatedly in hot and sandy conditions. No matter that a naval destroyer, the 3,500-tonne HMS Nottingham, hit a clearly charted rock off Australia. Behind every British success story, perhaps, there is are a clutch of failures jostling for recognition.
Sometimes British failure can be ascribed to our old friend, woeful misfortune. For example, four years before the Wright brothers conquered the skies, a British inventor almost beat them to it. But days before his first attempt at powered flight, Percy Pilcher died in a gliding accident, his design untried. But then, the British have never really eluded misfortune when they have sought to dominate the skies. Concorde was at best a mixed blessing, an innovative triumph that meant the likes of us subsidised the likes of them to have supersonic high jinks. And consider the Comet. The Comet was the world's first jet airliner, designed and built in Britain. After a successful first year in operation in 1952, manufacturers De Havilland had orders for 50 more Comets. Then disaster struck. The British Overseas Airways Corporation temporarily suspended all Comet jet services following the crash off Rome while checks were carried out. Modifications were made and the Comet went back into service. Then another Comet fell into the sea in 1954, killing all on board. Comets were grounded again. Tests found that the plane's fuselage was unable to withstand the pressures of flying. Cracks appeared in the bodywork that caused the plane to blow apart during flight. Although the Comet was redesigned, the Boeing 707 had gone into service by the time it was back in operation and the British jet was doomed to oblivion.
The British are virtuosos at rubbishing their inventors' attempts at attending to our transport needs. Who can forget the C5 ? Not Sir Clive Sinclair, who invented it and became as much of a standing national joke as that C5 of British politics, Iain Duncan Smith, as a result. Only the other day, the C5 was in the news when thieves who had stolen one from an antiques shop gave the cops the slip, even though the C5 runs on pedal power backed by an electric motor. That's how rubbish Britain is: even our police officers can't catch a getaway car that has a top speed of 15mph. Which, personally speaking, is why I kind of like the place.
So normal service has been resumed. The Beagle continues a grand British tradition. Or does it? After all, the Beagle 2 isn't the only Martian probe to go awol. Nasa's have done so with considerably regularity for five decades, but you don't hear Americans whingeing about national failure as a consequence. In fact it would be nice if they did.
Meanwhile, there's another possibility we haven't considered, namely that reports of the Beagle's failure have been exaggerated. "We need to get Beagle 2 into a period when it can broadcast for a much longer period," said Colin Pillinger, the Open University scientist behind the Beagle project. "This will happen around January 4, after the spacecraft has experienced a sufficient number of communication failures to switch to automatic transmission mode." Victory may yet be snatched from the jaws of defeat. It would be delightfully un-British if it was.
Lucas, the Prince of Darkness was the prime contractor for the electrical system.
NASA's twin robot geologists, the Mars Exploration Rovers, launched toward Mars on June 10 and July 7, 2003, in 2003 in search of answers about the history of water on Mars. They are scheduled to land on Mars January 3 and January 24 PST (January 4 and January 25 UTC).
Or read it below.. :-)
|
||
|
The engineers have studied various design ideas but have yet to figure out just how to get them to leak oil.
OTOH, all kidding aside, the British have the best machinists on the globe. Small quantity. All hand made. But the best.
There is, in fact, no evidence that victory was ever a possibility.
Not a very interesting article, but I loved the take on the Scots and the Irish.
Oh come now. There was the Sinclair.
lol, I cringe everytime I hear the name Lucas. I've got an older Jag (parked now), and I still don't comprehend what the "engineers" were thinking when they "designed" the electrical system. It's rather bizarre, nonsensical, and deliberately deficient. It's like they thought it didn't really matter. Poor Beagle.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.