Tuesday March 3rd 2009. Launch -44 days.

 

Today started in a rather alarming manner and I don’t mean by opening the blinds and seeing rain outside. As I came through the gate I was approached by someone who has a great interest in the success of the Herschel launch, asking me if I knew anything about a serious problem that had cropped up, which could cause a launch delay. This was the first news that I have had that there might be some kind of problem and, asking around, no one had any inkling of anything. It may be that something is going on that is being kept from us – it has happened – but it is also possible that someone has been engaging in Chinese whispers and that this rumour is totally groundless. We are all nervous. We all know how important Herschel is to ESA and how critical it is that the mission go well, so any hint that something is wrong, however tenuous, makes us jumpy. Hopefully tomorrow we will find out that it is all a misunderstanding.

 

Listening to the news this evening the reality of the outside world hits home night after night. After years of short-term contracts and a salary that was increasing inadequate I am in a secure job (always assuming that nothing terrible happens next month) with a good salary. Millions of people do not have this luck. Just as the crisis has arrived, I have found myself working for an important, prestigious project and, wonder of wonders, in this crisis investment in science and technology is increasing as governments realise for one that investing in technology always gives a high return on investment. We realise just how lucky to be where we are. However, a simple statistic brought home just how cheap the European Space Agency is. The ESA budget is about 3€ per European per year. Just one bank, the Royal Bank of Scotland, received funding from the British government to save it from collapse last year equivalent to around 700€ per United Kingdom taxpayer. It reminded me of the US citizen who, after the Mercury programme, wrote to NASA saying “I hear that the Mercury programme cost each American taxpayer 27 cents. Here’s my 27 cents: do it again!”

 

Today we have had one of those moments of light relief that shows the team spirit that has been built up. Having built up the team rota for the Simulations that start next week, I had, out of curiosity, made a graph of how many people would be on duty for each of the 15 days. In theory it should be a flat, straight line if we really have arranged the rota so that a roughly similar number of people are on duty each day. In fact, the number of people on duty drops progressively both weeks from Monday to Saturday, before ramping up again on Sunday and Monday. Why we should consistently have more people on duty on Sunday than on Saturday is beyond me but, obviously, the Group Leaders who have rostered their teams have their reasons. I was also struck by the way that the number of people on duty each day trended downwards through the two weeks, so the graph got put up on our noticeboard as a curiosity. It was no great surprise that various people started to make their own additions to the graphic (various hands are evident in the additions). The Boss added a trend line pointing sharply downwards and added the comment “no one left at launch?” (does he know something about our contracts????) The best addition though, which left people guffawing with laughter as they passed, was by a certain tall patrician gentleman occasionally mentioned here, who added a cut-out of a skiing penguin to the steep downward slope of the graph. Definitely moral is not a problem here and we do not take ourselves too seriously.

 

We do a lot of walking round the site during the day. Sometimes it is going to a meeting in another building. Sometimes it is to visit a colleague – like many colleagues, I find face to face meeting to be far better on many occasions than using the telephone. Sometimes it is just for our post-lunch walk. To get to and from our building there are various potential routes however, the most direct takes us up an earth bank that separates two paths. As always happens, the shortcuts that people use become obvious after time as bare, muddy paths [I should add that there is no grass as such, which would be ruinously costly to water in summer; it is all wild grass and weeds that the site gardener is gradually taming by cutting them frequently]. Finally, the site administration has recognised this shortcut and is making it official by installing some concrete steps up the bank. Every time that I have had to pass the construction today I have had to smile: presumably someone has decided that we are risking slipping on the mud and doing ourselves a nasty mischief.