"Space appears to have become fashionable again," says Dr Colin Hicks, director general of the British National Space Centre (BNSC).
Hicks is particularly busy at present. After the ill-fated Beagle 2 mission, the European Space Agency (ESA) has announced its desire to begin another Mars exploration space programme.
"Excitement has been driven by the interest in Mars and President Bush's statement that he intends to take people back to the Moon and then to Mars," says Hicks.
The US aims to undertake extended human missions to the Moon as early as 2015. It then plans to use the Moon as a base for further human space exploration, beginning with Mars.
Europe is keen to join the race to the red planet, and the ESA plans to land a rover on the planet in 2009. It is estimated that the vehicle, Mars Sample Return, will be able to return with a sample of the Martian surface between 2011 and 2014.
The ESA hopes to send humans to the Moon in 2024 and then to Mars between 2030 and 2033. The UK is currently mulling over its commitment to the challenge.
The UK space industry is worth £2.9bn a year. This figure encompasses research, the building of satellites, the construction of space systems, the creation of ground systems and the cost of direct services that flow from satellites, such as Inmarsat's global telecoms facility.
Government contributions represent £180m a year. The budget is directed towards space science, Earth observation and communication.
"We are not involved in manned launches and we have focused, in typical UK fashion, where we can get a leading-edge advantage," explains Hicks.
"We've concentrated on very narrow areas. And we decide whether or not to dedicate funding to specific sectors, such as space-based or ground-based telescopes."
The result of specialisation, Hicks says, is that when the UK turns its hand to an area of space research, it is usually one of the leading nations in the world to do so.
One of the key areas of development in the past few months has been the Beagle 2 programme, an attempt to search for signs of life on Mars. After successfully separating from the ESA's Mars Express satellite, communication with Beagle 2 was lost as the lander completed its descent to the Red Planet.
At the beginning of February, the ESA announced an inquiry that would attempt to identify the potential reasons for non-communication with the lander.
Hicks believes a number of lessons have been learned through the programme. Many are positive.
"It's amazing the innovative things people can do when they are put under time and financial pressure," he says.
The major constraint faced by the Beagle 2 team concerned the maximum mass of the lander, which could not exceed 68kg. That total included entry and descent landing systems.
"The team came up with a miracle of compression in terms of size of instruments and in the way the package was put together," recalls Hicks.
"I don't think any team has ever been put under such enormous mass constraints - and they found solutions."
Despite the successes of planning and development, Hicks recognises the frustrations of Beagle 2's failure to communicate with Earth. He says possible causes for failure could include the high risk of landing and the combination of events that could impact upon a space landing.
"Because of the tremendous restraints on mass we didn't have any telemetry operating during the descent, so we don't know where the point of failure actually happened. We hope the commission of inquiry will help to point out possible points of failure," says Hicks.
"And maybe with this additional information we'll be able to highlight areas that were more vulnerable than we appreciated during the original design."
The knowledge from the Beagle 2 inquiry will be taken forward and used in the UK's future space explorations. Some of these explorations may include a human voyage to the Red Planet.
"There are enormous challenges associated with a trip to the Red Planet and back," Hicks says. "Most of those are connected with life support, where a human can live and breathe."
Space flights create all sorts of health risks, including the lack of gravity and exposure to radiation. These risks remain separate to the challenge of landing safely on Mars - and returning to Earth.
"Our experiences of the past 30 years have shown how difficult it is to design even a robotic vehicle. Descending human beings safely, and bringing them back, adds an even higher dimension of risk," notes Hicks.
Just one in three robotic missions to Mars has landed and communicated successfully.
Journeys to Mars are also long and laborious. Using currently available propulsion technology, it would take six months to get to Mars and six months to return.
Before they can take off for the journey home, astronauts would have to wait for 19 months on the Red Planet until Mars and Earth approach their closest positions.
That means the total time for a round trip would be almost three years, cooped up in the same cockpit with the same crew.
Hicks stresses that it's important not to get bogged down by logistics. The European Aurora and Bush-led US programmes have set out an ideal where, in 20 years, knowledge might have accumulated to a point where it is possible to send people to Mars.
"President Bush has made a clear objective and the activities undertaken within the programme are to be aimed towards a successful manned mission to Mars and back," he says Hicks.
"Aurora is looking to accumulate the scientific knowledge that is necessary, but is deferring a decision on whether or not it is appropriate to send people to Mars."
The UK is clear: its current policy position states that sending people to Mars is not a useful objective.
But those hoping for a UK-funded, crewed trip to Mars shouldn't give up hope: careful robotic exploration could be the pre-cursor for something much more exciting in the future.
"It would be very helpful to learn more about Mars, but the most cost-effective way to advance our learning at the moment is to send robots," Hicks says.
"Let's do that for the next 10 or 20 years - and if at that point we discover that it's more cost-effective to send people, then we'll do it."
In early spring 2005, the ESA will ask member states to subscribe to the next phase of space exploration. Before this date the BNSC and the UK government must decide on its financial commitment.
The ESA programme is expected to cost about £614m over the next five years. The UK's share would mean boosting its annual space budget from £180m to about £210m. Hicks doesn't know whether the UK will find the extra funding required.
The decision will be taken against the demand for cash from other areas of the UK space programme and the specific interests of other European nations.
"We still don't know whether any countries are prepared to contribute to Aurora and whether manned space elements will be included in the programme. The nature of the project will change as countries begin to say what they're interested in," Hicks says.
"But it's clear that the UK science community and industrial sector is very keen on participating in Aurora."
Aurora is aiming to take forward the successes of the Mars Express programme and hopes to build on the public fascination with space - and, if possible, to match the aims of the US and President George W Bush's exploration programme.
A scientific achievement that the UK can be proud of
So, the UK's first space mission didn't quite turn out the way we all would have all liked.
The Beagle 2 project's search for life stalled before the investigation stage, when the landing craft failed to communicate with the Lander Operation Control Centre (LOCC) at the BNSC in Leicester.
But the development work undertaken still represents a major achievement for UK science and engineering.
The lander was produced through a collaboration between academia and industry, led by the Open University, and involving organisations as diverse as space company EADS-Astrium, the Universities of Leicester and Wales, and the Lottery-funded National Space Centre. UK supplier CODAScisys developed the software.
"Even when you're in the IT business, the Beagle 2 project stands out as the most exciting because it's not run-of-the-mill," says Martin Townend of CODAScisys, the ground system manager for the Beagle 2 mission.
The past few months have certainly been busy for Townend and his team following the failure of the Beagle 2 Mars lander to touch down safely on Christmas Day.
Priority is now given to the European and British space agencies' inquiry, set up to determine how future Mars missions might learn from the failure.
"Two weeks ago we switched from how things might have gone wrong - and how things might have been done better," states Townend.
The ground team is particularly interested in discovering how far the mission progressed after Beagle 2 separated from the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft.
"We've requested some images of the landing site and that will take time to process. We're going through a failure analysis to discover clues and direct evidence," says Townend.
Because of the high level of technical detail required, Townend is convinced that many forthcoming IT projects - both in space and on land - will benefit from the software and hardware developments of Beagle 2.
"We tried to do something very difficult and we were constrained by weight. Putting a lot of the spacecraft's functionality into the software doesn't add to the overall weight," he explains.
"Space software is rigorous and it's useful training for engineers from other disciplines."
Lessons learned from the Beagle 2 project may be taken forward to the next set of Mars exploration projects. The decision rests with the UK government.
"The opportunities are definitely out there," says Townend.
How we boosted our knowledge of space travel
The need to reduce the load of Beagle 2 lead to an exciting UK innovation: an aerial that actually reduced the weight of the craft.
Standard aerials stand above a vehicle and add weight to the mass of an object. The UK developers working on Beagle 2 created an inverted aerial that had the opposite effect.
"People thought they were going to add an aerial but they actually produced a negative mass aerial," says Hicks.
Leading-edge space research didn't stop there. Analytical instruments, which might traditionally have occupied a room, are being integrated and embodied in silicon and reduced to silicon scale.
"UK research is absolutely leading-edge and through Beagle 2 we've been able to bring forward micro-miniaturisation and nanotechnology techniques," says Hicks.
"Individuals keep coming up with innovative solutions. Faced with the challenge of doing something that hasn't been done before, the UK has a science and industrial community with a proven ability to work in new areas."
The community specialises in producing compact instrumentation for entry, descent and landing systems. Developers have also produced the associated high-tech instrumentation for sample analysis and collection.
The ability of rovers to move on Mars is currently limited by the time it takes to transmit information to and from Earth.
The next stage of robotic explorations to Mars will reduce communication time through the use of artificial intelligence and vision systems that allow a craft to move autonomously.
Sending robots to Mars requires specialist skills. "It's difficult to say the UK has the expertise - but we have people who see this as a leading-edge area where they'd like to be involved," says Hicks.
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