ESA Mars Express

The Soyuz rocket is a modified Soyuz that was built by Starsem. Starsem is a Euro-Russian consortium owned jointly by Arianne, Aerospatiale and TsSKB Samara.

If I heard corretly the 1st two stages of the Mars Express Launch rocket are true Soyuz, the 3rd stage is Arianne and the 4th stage was built by CASA of Spain.

I was reading a thread at an Irish webs site last night about this project, and there are some links there which might interest those who want to know something of the Beagle mission:

P45 Mars Mission thread[/color]

I thought it easier to post a link to the thread, rather than bring all the links over here.

Here's a link to another interesting thread at the same site:

CoolBritannia's thread[/color]

She tends to natter on after the first post, but that first post has an interesting story to tell . . .

Some questions are answered, perhaps, on the ESA-website:
ESA - Mars Express