Wednesday January 28th 2009. Launch -78 days.

Today I have suffered the blogger’s ultimate indignity. Having carefully prepared the day’s entry, I then, without realising, managed to overwrite it in the computer by accident with the next entry before it could be uploaded!

Today’s meeting was very intense. Imagine a group of some 20 people, all highly intelligent and with important responsibilities to the mission. None of them wants a problem in their area of responsibility to get out of control and to become a major issue that could threaten the launch. With launch getting closer and closer everyone is nervous. And, of course, the purpose of a forum like today’s meeting is to discuss problems before they do get out of control and to find solutions to them.

What, for me was the image of the day was one of the engineers from Mission Control coming into the meeting at 9am, already looking dog tired. For the people from Mission Control the Christmas holiday already feels a long time ago. They have gone through further rounds of very hard spacecraft and systems testing and still have a lot to do before launch. In fact, with just over 11 weeks to go, the degree of urgency in the project is increasing rapidly: that problem that was an irritation 6 months ago and a worry 3 months ago may now be a real threat if it has not been fixed quickly. In this situation everyone has an opinion as to what are the most urgent and what are the most important things to do and often different people will disagree strongly on priorities. Deadlines are becoming incredibly important as the amount of margin shrinks and the realisation sinks in that April 16^th 2009 is not just an abstract mark in a calendar.

Over the years the launch of Herschel has slipped back constantly. Why? Because people are always too optimistic with schedules. They always believe that more can be done in the time available than is realistically possible and that there will be no problems to fix. Now though the date is becoming more and more rigidly fixed and missing a deadline by even a few days becomes steadily more important and can have serious consequences. There is a lot of horse-trading with deadlines, particularly as people are increasingly busy and it becomes hard to juggle different obligations. There is also the constant juggling between what is urgent and what is important (“urgent” – I want that report tomorrow because it is overdue; “important” – I must have that report otherwise we will not be able to continue testing). However, at this stage trying to find an acceptable deadline can be very tough indeed and can become next to impossible at times, especially as people try desperately to avoid agreeing to deadlines that they will have difficulty meeting. There is a lot of give and take, but with increasing squeezed margins.

The upshot was that, at times, there was a real edge to the debate in the meeting. Not all decisions were satisfactory to everyone, but some quiet conversations in coffee breaks helped to resolve complicated issues, although there are some important ones where we simply do not have enough information to make an informed decision and no one would say that there are not. Overall, the meeting was successful. Seeing each other face-to-face is necessary sometimes and people do need a forum in which to express their concerns, sometimes forcefully: it is an essential safety valve. Another inescapable conclusion of the meeting is that we are still on target for a successful launch… if nothing else seriously goes wrong.

In the end, several of us left at 5:30pm with the meeting still in full swing because we had flights. Many of the present still had further meetings in the evening and a full day of them next day. I ended up arriving home, feeling exhausted, at 11:15pm.