Tuesday January 20th
2009
It has been a pretty historic day in
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.