Tuesday January 20th 2009


It has been a pretty historic day in
Washington. One of the advantages of working with what is a pretty high-powered group of people is that the conversation is rarely mundane and boring. We might be discussing alternative energy one day at lunch, or over coffee, the potential extinction of the human Race another and climate change the next. Today Barak Obama’s inauguration and the film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and the extraordinary paranoia that the film portrays were at the top of the menu. No one actually went home to watch the inauguration on TV, but people were keenly interested in what was going on.

 

Today we have gone a big step closer to defining the simulations. The Test Plan has also come a lot closer to its final version too: sufficiently close that I should be able to send it out tomorrow, a couple of days ahead of schedule. We now know what we are going to do outside the plan and roughly when. We also know depending on how things go, what sort of nasty little problems we will throw in to see how ready people are for the real thing (watchword: No Test Plan ever survives contact with reality). The Simulations are going to be two periods of very intense work with people working a 10/7 rota: weekends, Bank Holidays, people will be expected to work and every department will need to be covered: if there is a department that looks inadequately covered it is not beyond the realms of probability that they will discover that some really unpleasant spanner gets thrown in the works just at the worst possible moment. It may seem a bit cruel, but at 10€ per second mission costs, we can’t waste time in space because people aren’t ready and everyone realises it. By simulating carefully and as realistically as possible what we will be doing after launch we get ready for the real thing.

 

And, as I right, with Barak Obama in the White House, there is only one film to be watching on the DVD: “Deep Impact”, with Morgan Freeman’s very dignified and human role as a President. Let’s hope that Barak Obama only has to fight an economic crisis, not a celestial crisis.