Monday March 16th 2009. Launch -?? days.

 

This was the morning after the weekend before. It was a mercifully quiet day because I got home rather earlier than usual (shortly after 8pm) and fell asleep exhausted on the sofa, to wake up after a while, work for a short time on the minutes of briefings and then go to bed.

 

The tests have gone so well so far that people are relaxing. The rule for any space mission, where so much is at stake, is “test, test and test again and then test some more”. It is hard to believe that when just a few weeks ago we were struggling so much with the system that the danger now is of people getting overconfident. So, today, it was time to shake some people out of their complacency (if any). We had been planning some nasty surprises and today I got what the Boss called “one of the few pleasures of a twisted Test Coordinator” and dropped a bomb on some people’s expectations of a quiet few days. The reaction from some quarters was a degree of barely controlled hostility, indicating that we had most definitely called this one right. People get annoyed because they have to dedicate time that they would prefer to spend on doing something else in solving an imaginary problem. When each second of wasted time with Herschel is worth about 10 Euros, a minute and a half of wasted time is equivalent to about 1000 Euros. To avoid wasting time, you train, you practice for things going wrong so that if they do go wrong you know how to react. And, of course, things rarely go wrong at convenient times.

 

This afternoon we had the GOCE launch. Our big meeting room was filled with Press, television and radio, plus a large number of guests from industry. A few minutes before launch the doors on the launch structure around the rocket, which protects it from the extreme weather that may occur in Northern Russia, should have opened and then the building itself would roll away. We were told that this should happen about 5 minutes before launch and that at 2 minutes before launch fuel would start to be pumped and the launch sequence would be irreversible.

 

As the commentary silenced for the last minute (no countdown clock, no “10… 9… 8…”) I was sat there watching like the little boy who could not see the emperor’s wonderful new clothes, wondering why no one noticed that the rocket was still inside the building. Were the Russians seriously thinking of launching through the roof of a closed structure??? In fact, a number of the guests had realised that there was something horribly wrong somewhere. Publically, the countdown stopped at T-7s, but we assume that the Russian launch controller had aborted the launch minutes beforehand, but word simply had not reached Mission Control in Darmstadt. There was a lot of speculation afterwards, particularly as Plesetsk is a military launch site and the rocket was a converted ICBM – an SS-19 missile – about just how much information was coming out. That though was by the by.