Are we nearly there yet …?
On a balmy summer’s afternoon in 1977, Voyager 2 sat quivering on its Cape Canaveral launchpad.
Everyone at Mission Control on hyper-alert, the myriad systems all in contact with each other and all totally focused on the serene form waiting patiently on the launch pad for the command to go.
At 14:29 precisely on Saturday the 20th August, the Go for Launch command was triggered, and the spacecraft blasted off on its epic four-year journey to Saturn.
With a helpful gravity-assist from Jupiter some 19 months later it settled down to its next leg and appointment with Saturn.
Even travelling at 8 miles per second the journey took some four long years, so it was a good thing that there were no kids in the back.
Can you imagine, 30 minutes after launch and a little rascal piping up from the back seat, “are we nearly there yet?”.
But arrive it did and after a journey of 1.4 billion kilometres and four years it reached its planned rendezvous with Saturn just 2.7 seconds early!
The complexity of the planning process, the build programme and the craft’s epic journey through space are truly mind-boggling.
That it didn’t arrive hours or even days either side of schedule is truly astounding and a credit to the frighteningly clever pointy-headed flight engineers who made it happen.
Posed with the same calculations, I think I’d have wrapped a hot towel tightly around my head and hid in a cupboard.
Which rather put our plans for 2021 into perspective.
Hopefully, none of us has anything quite so complex to consider but the planning and thought processes we set time aside for are just as important to us, our businesses, and the customers we serve.
The tools we use to attract and engage with our audience may seem rather humdrum to us.
But with a little careful thought our Business Cards and Brochures, our Websites and Social Media Posts can be marshalled to beautiful effect.
And I’m here to help if you need it.
I’m signing off for my break on the 23rd but If you want a sounding board or just want to bend my ear, I’m on hand for a chat about anything to do with print or web design.
So please do ping me a message and I’d be delighted to help.
But in the meantime, …
A big thank you for sticking with my peripatetic musings and I hope that you manage to stay safe and have a wonderful well-earned break.
Alec
P.S. Just in case you’re wondering, as of last month Voyager 2 is now more than 11.6 billion miles away and heading intrepidly onwards and out of our solar system.
That every single day, it will be more than 840,000 miles further away from planet earth is truly astonishing.