I recently read Gene Kranz’s first hand account of the Gemini and Apollo Nasa missions. He talks about the rigorous simulation testing that flight directors had to partake in prior to a mission.
Simulation testing plays a crucial role in ensuring the preparedness of astronauts and flight controllers for spaceflight. This process is managed by a specialized team, led by the simulation supervisor. These simulations, meticulously designed to replicate real space missions as closely as possible, include a variety of challenging scenarios ranging from equipment malfunctions to unexpected emergencies.
The sim sup and their team deliberately craft these scenarios to test and push the flight team to their limits, ensuring they can handle multiple failures and make critical decisions under pressure. This rigorous training process has been instrumental in shaping effective strategies and response plans for actual space missions, contributing significantly to the safety and success of NASA’s spaceflight program.
This strikes me as something we could be doing more of in smart contract development where failure is also not an option.
A developer or external consultant could be assigned the role of sim sup to design and build the tests. This would involve forking the chain to a local testnet and then creating scenarios such as hacks, depegs and credential exposure to see how the team handles the scenario.
Any systems such as monitoring systems, alerts and would have to be forked to monitor the local testnet. Backdoors or vulnerable code might need to be injected in to the testnet contracts to enable a viable exploit.
A social media simulator could be created to record the teams public responses and any incoming information.
Multiple simulations could be played out over a 24 hour period to see how the team and their monitoring systems cope with the pressure.
After the simulation is completed a review and debriefing could take place to improve systems and procedures in case of a real life event.
