WI: Beagle 2 survives and lands successfully on Mars?

Simple, if on the small scale of things. Beagle 2, the British-built Martian surface probe, lands on Mars perfectly on Christmas Day, 2003, sending back data and responding to commands? How would it affect Britains stance on space policy and their place in the ESA?

Oh, and yes, we know that Beagle 2 isn't a NASA rover, as claimed by Michael Bay's Transformers. Let's just get that out of the way and be done with that.
 
Definitely more ESA planetary probes, especially to Mars. Possibly a Beagle 3.

There was in fact a proposed Beagle 3, by the lead scientist on Beagle 2. It seems, from a bit of reading, that a follow-on mission would've involved multiple probes being landed at different points on Mars, in a similar fashion to Viking, although unlike Viking, which used one rocket for each probe, there would be one 'Beagle 3' rocket launching a bus of probes (Beagle 3A, Beagle 3B, and so on) at Mars, which would then separate and follow independent courses to their own spots on the surface. That would of course be more expensive than the £44 million Beagle 2, though perhaps the British government would direct enough of its space efforts away from commercial and towards scientific ends to at least partly fund the program.
 
I'd see this as a huge setback for the UK space industry and planetary exploration in general. Beagle 2 was a textbook case of how not to run a project, giving the impression of an attitude of "leave no corner un-cut". A few consequences of it somehow by a fluke managing to land and operate as planned could be:

1) We get more good science of Mars. The results of the effort to detect methane would be especially interesting.

2) Colin Pillinger gets a knighthood and a massive ego boost. He immediately pushes for a follow-on probe.

3) The lessons aren't learnt from Beagle-2. A mutated strain of Victory Disease takes hold, and there's a wider push for super-low-cost space missions on the Beagle model. Any projects that make it to launch do not roll the three sixes Beagle-2 somehow managed and fail. Because the totally inadequate monitoring telemetry of Beagle-2 is not seen as a problem and so is never corrected, we never find out exactly why these failed.

4) Before they fail, the success of the low cost Beagle-2 puts political pressure on NASA to reduce their own costs, especially the spiraling budget for the Mars Science Laboratory rover (a.k.a. Curiosity). This belated revival of the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" crowd, combined with Administrator Griffin's attitude of "we know what we're doing, no need for detailed analysis of other options" (see also Ares-I), leads to inadequate testing and MSL's failure. This in turn makes Congress unwilling to fund similar large, Flagship projects in the future (despite the fact it was pressure from their side that drove the MSL failure - see also Commercial Crew IOTL, where Congress justifies cutting budgets based on delays caused by them cutting budgets...).

5) Britain's standing in ESA is weakened, as they try to force more Beagle-style missions piggy-backed on ESA probes. ESA hated working with the Beagle team because of the lack of professionalism and the late changes it forced on Mars Express (after promising to stay within parameters). They will not be happy at having to repeat the experience.
 
I'd see this as a huge setback for the UK space industry and planetary exploration in general. Beagle 2 was a textbook case of how not to run a project, giving the impression of an attitude of "leave no corner un-cut". A few consequences of it somehow by a fluke managing to land and operate as planned could be:

1) We get more good science of Mars. The results of the effort to detect methane would be especially interesting.

2) Colin Pillinger gets a knighthood and a massive ego boost. He immediately pushes for a follow-on probe.

3) The lessons aren't learnt from Beagle-2. A mutated strain of Victory Disease takes hold, and there's a wider push for super-low-cost space missions on the Beagle model. Any projects that make it to launch do not roll the three sixes Beagle-2 somehow managed and fail. Because the totally inadequate monitoring telemetry of Beagle-2 is not seen as a problem and so is never corrected, we never find out exactly why these failed.

4) Before they fail, the success of the low cost Beagle-2 puts political pressure on NASA to reduce their own costs, especially the spiraling budget for the Mars Science Laboratory rover (a.k.a. Curiosity). This belated revival of the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" crowd, combined with Administrator Griffin's attitude of "we know what we're doing, no need for detailed analysis of other options" (see also Ares-I), leads to inadequate testing and MSL's failure. This in turn makes Congress unwilling to fund similar large, Flagship projects in the future (despite the fact it was pressure from their side that drove the MSL failure - see also Commercial Crew IOTL, where Congress justifies cutting budgets based on delays caused by them cutting budgets...).

5) Britain's standing in ESA is weakened, as they try to force more Beagle-style missions piggy-backed on ESA probes. ESA hated working with the Beagle team because of the lack of professionalism and the late changes it forced on Mars Express (after promising to stay within parameters). They will not be happy at having to repeat the experience.


So what if it never got any cuts? what if the program had been run correctly?
 
So what if it never got any cuts? what if the program had been run correctly?

Sorry, to clarify, when I refer to Beagle-2 cutting corners, I mean technical corners, not financial. It was done on a shoestring budget, but I don't think it had any actual funding cuts - it never requested more money, and claimed not to need it.

If Beagle-2 had been proposed as a typical mission (which is before the PoD specified in the original post, as I understand it), it likely never would have been started, as it would have been too expensive for a UK commitment and so would have to have gone through the ESA selection process as with any other mission. That alone would probably have delayed it past Mars Express' launch (which was already approved), so the mission would have needed to find another ride, either piggybacking on a NASA probe or developing its own. The costs would have been around 5-10 times higher and it would have taken at least one more launch opportunity (2 years), maybe more. But it would have been far more likely to have succeeded. It would have been completely different from OTL's Beagle-2 though (except perhaps in its objectives).
 
Simple, if on the small scale of things. Beagle 2, the British-built Martian surface probe, lands on Mars perfectly on Christmas Day, 2003, sending back data and responding to commands? How would it affect Britains stance on space policy and their place in the ESA?

Oh, and yes, we know that Beagle 2 isn't a NASA rover, as claimed by Michael Bay's Transformers. Let's just get that out of the way and be done with that.

What I do remember as a European - not British - that up to the landing it was an entirely British mission according to British media.
ESA wasn´t mentioned at all in the articles.
When no contact was made after the landing the British media suddenly described it as an ESA mission.

I found that very impressive.
Inside of 24 hours a British Mars mission suddenly became an ESA failure.
 
I'd see this as a huge setback for the UK space industry and planetary exploration in general. Beagle 2 was a textbook case of how not to run a project, giving the impression of an attitude of "leave no corner un-cut".

This tbh. The management problems are well known, but the science strategy was flawed too. We know that the surface is oxidised and irradiated and not well suited to the preservation of organic matter that the stepped-combustion IRMS was intended to study.

So there's a very good chance that it would have detected no organic carbon and therefore found no isotopic fractionation effects. Since Beagle 2 was advertised as a life-detection mission, it would have returned a negative result - "No evidence of life on Mars". That would have been damaging to the Mars programme, much like the negative Viking results.

The problem is that we can't assume that the chemical and isotopic evidence for life is ubiquitous, as it very likely won't be, if it's there at all. Noachian Mars was habitable, but it still looks like a hostile, arid environment and the four billion years since then will have destroyed any biomarkers close to the surface. This means that we've got to find the right place to look for the evidence of life first, rather than just chucking a lander on to the surface and hoping for the best. Hence the geological exploration strategy of Nasa.

The ideal strategy is a caching rover than can explore a region, identify an attractive locality, such as recently-exposed Noachian subaqueous sediment, drill down a metre or two and then leave the sample on the surface, ready for collection by a Mars Sample Return mission, to enable study via the full force of terrestrial laboratories, rather than the volume, mass and power-constrained robotic rover systems.
 
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