Beagle 2 was a British built spacecraft designed for the 2003 European Space Agency Mars Express mission. After successfully disembarking from the mother ship contact was lost as the craft approached the red planet’s atmosphere.

Its fate is unknown, with speculation that it may have missed the planet altogether and entered orbit around the sun, burnt up on entry to the atmosphere, hit the surface of the planet too hard, or simply landed correctly but failed to report back due to a minor fault.

Repeated attempts have been made to reestablish contact with Beagle 2, but none have succeeded and the craft was officially declared lost in early 2004.

Beagle 2 is not alone in having failed to complete a mission to Mars. To date, out of 37 attempts, only 18 Mars missions have succeeded.

In 2007 the Johnson Space Center and Professor Colin Pillinger announced plans to launch an updated version of Beagle 2 attached to a moon lander mission.

LEANING TOWER OF PISA

The Tower of Pisa (La Torre di Pisa) was built to be the freestanding bell tower for Pisa Cathedral. It began to lean just five years after construction began as the third floor was added in 1178 due to shallow three metre foundations and unstable soil.  Building work was suspended for almost a century due to local warfare, enabling the ground to settle and almost certainly preventing the tower from collapsing.

In 1272 the next phase of construction was completed, and the first attempts were made to correct the tilt as engineers made one side of upper floors higher than the other. This had the effect of making the 55.86m high tower lean in the other direction. The bell tower was finally added in 1372.

In the 1940s Benito Mussolini ordered the tower to be returned to its vertical position, and concrete was poured into its foundations. This caused the 14,500 tonne structure to sink still further into the ground.

In the mid-1960s two decades of research by engineers, mathematicians and historians commenced with a brief to stabilise the tower, but to retain the now globally famous lean. The tower was closed to the public for a decade in 1990, the bells were removed to reduce the weight, and cables were used to temporarily anchor the tower whilst 38m3 of soil were removed from underneath the raised side.

Now standing at a stable 5.5 degree angle, the Leaning Tower of Pisa is expected to remain stable for many decades.

FORD PINTO

Included on the Forbes list of the worst cars of all time, the Ford Pinto became notorious when it was alleged that a impact from behind could rupture the car’s fuel tank and cause an explosion, whilst the poorly reinforced doors could jam preventing escape. Such stories led to the Pinto being known as "the barbecue that seats four."

The vehicle’s reputation received a further blow with the leak of what became known as the Ford Pinto Memo, which appeared to compare the cost of an $11 repair to make the vehicles safer against the cost of paying off potential law suits (an apparent example of immoral corporate greed later recreated in the film Fight Club).

In a subsequent 1981 lawsuit, Grimshaw v. Ford Motor Co., the California Court of Appeal for the Fourth Appellate District reviewed Ford's conduct, and upheld compensatory damages of $2.5 million and punitive damages of $3.5 million against Ford after a woman was killed in an explosion and her passenger, 13-year old Richard Grimshaw, was badly burned and scarred for life.

Recent analysis of the case and the car cast a slightly different light on the popular legend, however.  Rather than the ‘hundreds’ safety campaigners had claimed were victims of the Pinto’s design, there were 27 confirmed deaths from fires involving the 2 million Pintos on the road, lower than the average fatality rate for a car produced during the 1970s.

No discussion of failure could fail to include the sinking of RMS Titanic, a catastrophe that claimed over 1,500 lives made worse by the fact the boat had been declared “practically unsinkable” before disaster struck on its maiden voyage.

The loss of the Titanic led to the introduction of many safety improvements, including reinforcing the hull and increasing the height of the watertight bulkheads; introducing double hulls; and extending the double bottoms above the waterline.

SAUNDERS-ROE PRINCESS

A huge flying boat, powered by ten Bristol Proteus turboprop engines and with sixpropellers, the Saunders-Roe Princess was obsolete soon after its maiden flight in 1952 as improved runways and airports were built to meet the demand for larger planes on land. The prototype was broken up in 1967.