Saturday February 14th 2009. Launch -61 days.

 

Today has been a quiet day. I am not suggesting that there is a relationship between quiet days and our system engineer not being on duty, but people have remarked about it. It seems though that everything is working, which is always nice to hear. Working on a Saturday there is a nice, community atmosphere. We all go to lunch together in one group, sit together at two tables and muck in together. A normal working day we split into a lot of different groups, separated by teams, who all eat at different times but, on Saturday and Sunday the seating arrangements would make even a Macedonian proud of the diversity.

 

Thursday night’s launch was, we are told, the 43rd Ariane 5 launch, the 41st successful launch and the 29th consecutive success. We are now looking forward to making “29” into “30”. There seems to be plenty to be optimistic about at this time, although as it always is in a big project of any kind, getting the software ready and tested in time is always a race against the clock. However, we feel that we are making progress.

 

My day was spent in mainly administrative tasks: taking and writing minutes, participating in meetings, updating the noticeboard, etc. I also finished off the major task of reading through all the minutes of briefings of all the tests that we have done, looking at which parts of the system worked well and which failed each day. From this we hope to find some patterns in behaviour that will help us to understand which parts of the system have been especially vulnerable and need to be strengthened for operations. I also should confess to one incident yesterday that left some people a little nonplussed during lunch. I had just gone to get coffee and we were discussing our database problems and it was remarked that it had been hoped that our retired expert would simply arrive, wave a magic wand and fix all our problems. At this point, four software engineers to my left, including said person, picked up a tube biscuit and waved it around like a magic wand while our mischievous patrician head of that team intoned “Izzy wizzy, let’s get busy!” – the magic words from some British childrens’ programme of at least 40 years ago. I am afraid that I just cracked-up completely. The rest of the table to the right of me who had missed this incident really wondered what the hell was going on! Team spirit is definitely not a problem here.