Just on the BBC - Prof Colin Pillinger has died of a brain haemorrage.
An inspiration for space travellers everywhere.
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An inspiration for space travellers everywhere.
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A Tribute to Colin Pillinger
From David Braben:
“I was very sorry to hear of the death yesterday morning of the wonderful Colin Pillinger. I had the honour to appear in a book with him called ‘The Backroom Boys,’ written by Francis Spufford. He was an inspirational, charismatic and eccentric character, managing to get a tiny spacecraft into space for millions of pounds as opposed to hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars. It is a real shame that it crashed (something not uncommon in such exploration missions), and so there was not the succession of cheap space craft exploring the Solar system we had all hoped for. Such an excellent evangelist for space exploration and for science generally will be sadly missed.
We have renamed one of the stations in Alpha 4 ‘Beagle 2 Landing’ in honour of him, in much the same way as I named the planet Feynman shortly after the death of the excellent scientist of that name in Frontier: Elite 2.”