I'm getting awfy worried about Mars.
The Americans have sent up yet another motor vehicle. The way it's going, space won't be the final frontier. It will be a scrapyard. Quite soon Nasa will need to despatch a tow-truck to take all their previous broken-down motors to a breaker's yard in the Gale Crater.
The latest arrival, a rover called Curiosity, has survived its landing and is tootling aboot the red planet. We all know it will hit a rock and be rendered immobile 140 million miles from the nearest RAC patrol.
Just like the 2009-registration Mars rover called Spirit which got bogged down in soft soil. The Nasa folk spent months switching Spirit on and off and twiddling their joysticks before the bitterly cold Martian winter set in and its batteries ran out. Spirit's twin vehicle Opportunity is still on the move eight years later but will be due its MoT.
Apparently at least half of the expeditions to Mars have ended in failure with the Russians having the worst track record. They did manage to get their Mars 3 lander to touch down successfully but it ceased transmission 15 seconds later. Fill in your own jokes about Lada technology.
Britain is relatively blameless when it comes to causing a blight on the Mars landscape.
We did try in 2003 to send up a small device called Beagle 2. It was all going so well until the last minute when the British rover left the mother ship but went missing.
Our space scientists had to announce to the world that the Beagle had not landed.
I seem to recall there was a Beagle 1 device which landed somewhere in outer space but flipped on to its back and lay there helpless. It might have been on Mars or the Moon or maybe the wastelands of West Lothian.
I suspect there is an agenda to turn Mars into the Planet of the Automobiles. It may look as if it has even more potholes than Glasgow's streets but there are flat bits.
Mars would be an ideal permanent location for Formula One. Sadly, this is unlikely since the vehicles up there reach a maximum speed of 90 metres per hour. Let's not rule out the possibility of sending Jeremy Clarkson and all his pals from Top Gear.
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