Man on the Moon

Following on in the space theme (gettit?), a 'consortium of space interests' has tabled some ideas for the UK to have it's own mission to the moon. Not to land on it, obviously, but to slam some probs into it so we can get a better idea of what it is made of. While the UK has links with both NASA and ESA, it would like to have a few missions of it's own, especially now the costs are dropping. The UK is also a leader in satellite technoloy and so we have the skills already here and it would help us remain competitive and give us a reason to develop new technologies that could help bring economic benefits, or so they say.

I like the idea of the Brits using our know-how to get back into space, obviously not in a big way, but we can easily build remote devices. You've only got see how much we got behind the ill-fated Beagle 2 mission, an extremely low-budget attempt (I doubt anyone else in the world could of even attempted it on the budget they had) to see that public opinion would be behind it.