Real Ale TWATS: In SPAAAACE, no one can churn your cream

Something for the Weekend, Sir? How can you get pissed, generously fed AND intellectually intrigued for a mere tenner in this day and age? Easy: sign up to attend one of The Register’s Christmas Lectures. Oh, except you can’t because the last one was held earlier this week in central London. Sorry if you missed it, heh.

OK, a few pints won’t get the average Reg reader pissed exactly but it was certainly enough for you to drop a pin on the location of the pub toilets with a view to conducting a personal reconnaissance later. As for the nosh, no celebrity chefs were harmed during the filming. Instead, we were served a veritable Jenga mountain of pork pies. Sure, you may scoff ... and indeed we did, all for a tenner.

Not being much of a beer drinker since leaving Yorkshire for the Big Smoke in 1987, the year I discovered that all beer south of the Midlands is piss, I toddled off to the bar with a plan to swap all my Vulture Tokens for a single tumbler of Scotch.

Intriguingly, the bar had been fitted with several hundred tap handles, none of which was labelled Guinness. Rather, they were marked with unfamiliar names such as Wood Rot 97 and Fay’s Olde Ebola, some of them scrawled in chalk. For, in its exhaustive citywide efforts to choose the perfect venue for such a high-profile, hi-tech lecture event as this, The Reg had managed to pick the spare room upstairs in a real ale pub situated about 300 yards from its own office front door.

A bearded man wearing a hat indoors invaded my personal spaaaace, leant over my shoulder and enquired from the landlord, in his most booming Ian McKellen, whether the Skinned Squirrel was on tap that evening.

I had inadvertently stepped into the world of Viz Comic’s The Real Ale Twats.

Choosing not to start a riot by carelessly ordering a pint of Carling, I decided to go with the flow and took my bubbly-headed pint of Wombat Foetus upstairs to await the intellectual entertainment element of the evening.

This final event of the Christmas Lecture series was "What Planet Should We Be On?" – a short talk with pictures and videos delivered by Dr Geraint Jones of UCL’s Mullard Space Science Lab on the European Space Agency’s involvement in the exploration of duck-shaped rocks.

Thankfully, Dr Jones is the kind of man who calls a spade a bloody shovel and is not given to using the word “amazing”. He is Apollo 13 rather than Gravity, The Right Stuff rather than Interstellar, and considerably more Ground Control than Major Tom – although I believe he is more than capable of conceiving an instrument to collect and measure such a thing as "ziggy" stardust.

As a result, the Q&A session with Reg readers following his talk concentrated on topics such as developments in the design and testing of re-usable spacecraft, the challenge of shielding instruments from radiation and the practicalities of keeping the International Space Station stocked with food. Fortunately, no-one embarrassed themselves by asking a question about “first contact” or comparing Philae’s landing skills to those of Bruce Willis – even though Bruce totally nailed that one in my opinion.

Youtube Video

For me, however, the most striking realisation I took home with me that evening about modern space exploration was that it now incorporates an excruciatingly tedious period of hibernation that can last a decade or more. With my dull imagination still stuck in Moon-landing mode, it never occurred to me what happened at Ground Control between, say, launching Voyager 1 in 1977 and it going interstellar in 2012.

This is the real reason for handing one-small-step responsibilities to Metal Mickey’s bastard offspring, of course. If you sent a human on a mission to Jupiter, he’d probably go bonkers, kill his crew mates, blame it on the computer, go stargate joyriding and live out the rest of his days over the course of five minutes imagining he was living in a white bedroom with nobody to talk to but the resident monolith.

But what happens to everyone back at Ground Control while Major Tom’s going nutso? The thought of the same group of scientists following the project all the way from sperm to worm suddenly seemed unlikely, unless the Voyager team is made up of white-haired geeks whizzing from desk to desk on motor scooters.

According to Dr Jones, the teams on these projects are whittled down not long after launch and even further when the craft is safely on course and has switched into hibernation. For the next decade or so, someone checks its update from time to time, and only when it wakes up again as it approaches its destination is a new team assembled, largely comprising different people. This is because most of the original launch dudes have moved on or died, or become dot-com millionaires, or Tea Party members – in which case they now believe that the Rosetta space probe achieved its purpose not through scientific brainpower and rocket propulsion but through “God’s will”.

Mind you, Dr Jones did work personally on the pre-launch of Rosetta in 2004 ... as a cleaner. He was still a student working towards his PhD. Ten years later, his involvement in the project was dramatically enhanced. Just imagine if politics worked this way: 10 years ago, David Cameron might have been cleaning the toilets around Westminster.

This, then, raises another question: how frustrating is it to launch a heavy probe into space with its chunky IT hardware and clunky software in the certain knowledge that it’ll be seriously out of date before it even reaches Mars? One minute you’ve just launched a three-tonne foil-wrapped dustbin containing a £1m customised Intel 486 that churns out a handful of numbers and the occasional “Does not compute” message, and before you know it, your kids are hacking into your neighbour’s Tesla and reprogramming the town’s traffic lights using a £35 Raspberry Pi.

In fact, after waking up a probe that someone else launched a decade ago, how sure can you be that you have any kit still left on Earth that can talk to it? Just imagine a day in the future as your brand new team assembles in a gigantic room full of flashing lights and bleeping noises, surrounded by government leaders and members of the world press, at which point you flick the magic switch to wake up the probe after its lengthy hibernation and up pops a splash screen: Welcome to Windows Vista Ultimate.

The president of the world is now leaning over your shoulder and your brow breaks into a sweat as you try to release the comet lander.

A program is trying to run. Enter your password to allow this.

You type in the password that your predecessor’s descendants have been keeping for generations on a framed Post-It note.

The president of the world has learned many new things on his visit to ESA Ground Control, including the limitations of vintage operating systems, the smart forward thinking of installing a self-destruct button in the comet lander, and the uniquely colourful British expression “buggeration”.

It makes you wonder how many missions were launched in 2007. I’ll go and have a check while you hunt down some documentation. Let’s meet back here in 20 years. ®