Reach for the moon

As the man behind the much publicised Beagle 2 mission to Mars in 2003, Professor Colin Pillinger is one of Britain's most prominent space scientists. He tells Disability Now about the reasons for Beagle's ultimate demise, the ongoing quest to find life on Mars, having MS, and sending man back to the moon

I first got involved in space after finishing my PhD and went straight into working on the Apollo programme for NASA.

As a chemist, I happened to have the skills they needed. I worked with mass spectrometers, which are very good at analysing all sorts of stuff and I’ve now been working for 40 years building them. We even have one en route to a comet; it gets there in 2014.

The reason we wanted to send Beagle 2 to Mars was to repeat experiments done on meteorites that seemed to show there’s life on Mars. The problem with meteorites that have landed on earth is that they could have picked up contamination, so the only way to challenge the doubting Thomases was to send the instrument to Mars to do the experiments there.

In 1997, I found out the European Space Agency (ESA) was thinking of sending an orbiter to Mars and I went along to them and said “you need to send a lander to look into this question of life.”

We engineered it to be a well-known project. When we started, we didn’t have any money.

We had to convince a lot of people that it was worth working on, and we began by working for nothing. Eventually the Government gave us some money. However, the big problem was that we got it later than we needed it. If we had had it earlier, we could have avoided some of the risks we had to take. We were playing catch-up the whole time.

I’m now working with NASA to design a system that might be useful to go back to the moon – to the lunar south pole. There’s a lot of interest in the possibility of water being there, and the instrument we built for Beagle will be just as good to go and do that study.

The ESA has in mind that it wants to have a manned mission to the moon in the next decade, and it’s interested in this polar site because it would have resources.

It would be going back to where I started. One of the things we wanted (during the Apollo mission) was to see if any of the moon rocks were sedimentary, to see whether the dark regions were in fact seas. It won’t be quite the same project but it would be nice to go back to the pole and study what might have happened if there was water there.

I now have MS. I’m not totally immobile but I couldn’t run around like I did during Beagle, when I drove 200,000 miles in the space of six years.

There’s nothing wrong with my brain: I can still think and talk, and I’m still active enough to think about working on the moon again. I’d also like to see the result of the mission to fly to a comet, because I started that 28 years ago.

To get to a comet you have to wind your space­craft up like a clockwork spring, and every time you go round a planet you uncoil it and it goes a bit faster. What we have to do with this particular spacecraft is fly back in, and our instrument will be landed on the comet.

That’s not easy, as you have no idea what the situation is like on a comet, so it’s very much a guess. I started in 1985, and when we get there it’ll be 2014. I’d like to see the result of that: it’s a quarter of a lifetime.

• Colin Pillinger was talking to Paul Carter