I gave a talk yesterday about Fault Protection, the work we do to ensure errors in our spacecraft don’t result in mission failure, and I used this quote from Futurama:
And it got me thinking how true that is about our current situation. In spacecraft we spend years behind the scenes making those missions work and if it all goes to plan a lot of that work never sees the light of day.
I spent months on a scenario where @MarsCuriosity got stuck in Earth orbit and we had to safely get the nuclear materials into the Pacific using the control thrusters for the entry into Mars atmosphere. Thank goodness we never used it.
Now we’re all making sacrifices daily and the hope is for an outcome where it looks like nothing is happening. It’s tough to make that feel like success, but it is.
It’s funny because my entire job isn’t usually about making things better at all. It’s about making sure the things you want to work continue to work. Very unglamorous, like plumbing. But think of how important plumbing is.
I’m beginning to worry I’ve spent too long here because I want to use spacecraft analogies to talk about crisis responses, but it turns out both are complex systems and there are parallels.
Like would you believe the first part of determining a spacecraft error is detection? It’s very much like, ahem, testing. So if you want to know where your problems are you do error tests, kind of like testing for...symptoms of a disease
Your next steps are determined by that. You can isolate the issue (is this familiar?) so it doesn’t take down other systems. You sure don’t want your high temperature in one area to cause high temperatures in other areas...
After you’ve isolated it, you look at options for recovery. In some cases that’s turning it off and then on again (this is less effective in humans), but often that means issuing certain commands that get it back in a normal configuration (like a treatment).
It’s almost too perfect.
This concludes my segment on why spacecraft are the perfect analogy for everything.
But a reminder: it might seem like all the work we are doing, the sacrifices we are making right now don’t matter. They do. Surviving today to thrive tomorrow is exactly what life is about.
But a reminder: it might seem like all the work we are doing, the sacrifices we are making right now don’t matter. They do. Surviving today to thrive tomorrow is exactly what life is about.
