The heroes of British engineering

BACKROOM BOYS: The Secret Return of the English Boffin by Francis Spufford (Faber, 14.99)

AT Christmas (fingers crossed) the welkin will ring with the news that the Beagle has landed. The British-built Beagle 2, released from Europe's Mars Express spacecraft, is to parachute onto the surface of the Red Planet to look for chemical evidence of life. It goes there because a longhaired professor at the Open University took on the penny-pinchers. To get his Martian lander, he had to add to his technical prowess a talent for showmanship.

As an archetypal British project, Beagle 2 is the latest of half- a-dozen episodes in the recent history of engineering, selected by Francis Spufford for his new book. A common thread is the role of dedicated individuals. The pre-war radar pioneer Robert Watson-Watt would have called them "makers to happen", in distinction from the discoverers and inventors who were "makers possible".

Prospero is the name of the first and last space satellite ever launched entirely unaided by the UK. That was back in 1971 when a rocket using homespun technology rose from Woomera in Australia and delivered the 66kg satellite into orbit. The project was done so cheaply it was more of a white mouse than a white elephant, as Spufford explains. But the politicians abandoned satellitelaunching to the French.

Concorde, on the other hand, appealed to politicians as different as Julian Amery and Tony Benn.

Engineering-wise, the world's first supersonic passenger plane was sublime - to use Spufford's word.

He says little about the Anglo-French team of boffins behind Concorde, but a lot about the budgetary witchcraft that concealed the commercial fiasco by subsidising high-speed jaunts by the well-to- do, right into the 21st century.

His inclusion of the human genome project as an example of the return of the British boffin is puzzling. The international effort to decode every gene in our hereditary repertoire was highly publicised, well-funded with public money, cumbersome and slow. When American boffin Craig Venter saw how to do the work much more quickly, the "public" scientists vilified him as a man bent only on making money. Sadly, in Spufford's inverted way of telling this tale, the mud still sticks.

Returning to space for the Beagle 2 story, we learn how individual willpower triumphed over policy, when the opportunity arose to add a lander to Mars Express.

Planetary science was a poor relation within the UK system for research funding, which at first allotted only 2.7 million towards the cost of Beagle 2. The leading scientist, Colin Pillinger, brazenly promoted the project via the media and by public appearances. As a result, the Government put up 5 million. Still not nearly enough, but the space industry contributed in kind.

Pillinger's next hope was that the spacecraft might carry company logos, such as a racing car. That proved to be a barren idea, but by then it was far too late to visualise any other lander for Mars Express. In the end, the European Space Agency forked out the missing 14 million.

Spufford uses technobabble in the manner of science-fiction writers, to enthuse rather than confuse, and his racy style matches the high spirits of his heroes. In the tradition of Brunel, sports cars and James Bond's colleague Q, British engineering has got to be fun.

. Nigel Calder's latest book is Magic Universe: The Oxford Guide to Modern Science

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