Should they go for a single mega-project that may be more reliable, but which would sacrifice years of effort and a mountain of cash if it fails.

Or, for the same price, should they build several smaller, cheaper probes, whose single loss would not be catastrophic but which may contain flaws that were overlooked.

The latest missions to Mars show how space can be a costly graveyard of dashed dreams. Since 1960, there have been 33 missions to fly by, orbit or land on the red planet, and nearly two-thirds of them have ended in a major failure of some kind.

For decades, budget and technological factors meant the "big is beautiful" prevailed in unmanned space exploration.

That thinking went up in smoke in August 1993 with the loss of the United States' Mars Observer, whose engine system malfunctioned just as it was about to go into orbit. The craft is now an 800-million-dollar piece of junk in deep space, slowly circling the Sun.

Under pressure not to put all their eggs into one expensive basket, American scientists changed tack, opting for projects that were cheaper and faster -- and whose individual loss would not be a disaster.

The new approach began in 1996, with the launch of the United States' Mars Global Surveyor -- an orbiter that has performed superbly -- heralding a prolonged US exploration of the planet, with small-scale projects being launched every two years or so.

"I'm an absolute believer in small projects -- smaller, faster, cheaper," says Colin Pillinger, lead scientist in Beagle 2 project, the probe that is at the heart of European Space Agency's 2003 mission, Mars Express.

A probe could be built in three or four years and sent on its way for around 150 million dollars, while a "project that costs a billion dollars and 10 years to come into fruition can have the (budget) rug pulled away from it after eight years," he said.

Where large projects score is not in the size of the probe, it is in the money that goes into double-checking and testing to ensure that machinery is reliable and programmes are bug-free, he said.

"With the bigger projects, it's not so much the size or the vulnerability, it's the cost in man hours," Pillinger told AFP. "You can absolutely fail-safe and test and test and test until you're sure nothing can go wrong.

"With smaller teams, there is better coordination and work progresses faster, but the risk is that much higher."

In the case of the doomed Mars Observer, 640 million dollars of the 800-million price tag was the cost of labour.

The two latest US missions to Mars are just a fraction of that cost, although questions may ultimately have to be raised about whether vital work may have been missed because of the cut-price approach.

On September 23, a crass programming error that mixed up metric and imperial measures sent a 125-million-dollar scout, the Mars Climate Orbiter, into a fatal angle of descent.

The outlook for a fellow unmanned probe, the 165-million-dollar Mars Polar Lander, also looks grim. The emissary touched down last Friday about 800 kilometers (500 miles) from the planet's South Pole but as of Monday had still failed to call home.

ESA spokesman Franco Bonacina said European scientists saw value in the faster, cheaper approach, sensing that it was only logical to "do more with less money."

But, he said, most of ESA's projects are major astronomy schemes that require highly reliable hardware capable of coping with the rigours of space for a long operational life.

He pointed to the launch this Friday of Europe's most ambitious space project -- a 689-million-dollar orbiting X-ray telescope aboard an Ariane rocket.

Copyright 1999 AFP. All rights reserved. The material on this page is provided by AFP and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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