Review of Yesterday's Performance

Tonight at 11 PM EDT, NASA TV showed a replay of Tuesday morning's one-hour LRO LOI television coverage. The program was shown in both the MOC and LSR...our first chance to see how we came across on TV.
Darn it, I forgot to emote! My chance to be spotted by a talent agent has fallen to shreds...again.
The burn went so well that there wasn't much to show until it ended. My colleague Mike Blau commented to Bruce Trout about halfway through, "This is the most boring sim we've done."
Being up all night probably kept me pretty low key. Tension was probably the primary sensation I had through most of the burn. Not a lot, but some. Relief and a bit of incredulity came after it ended. A mix of other strong (good) emotions surfaced (mostly showing, others held back a bit as necessary) when I celebrated with the rest of the team.
Here's the big picture: my notes indicate that I first met with Mike Blau and Rick Saylor, the Ground Systems and Operations lead (and last night's flight director) when I joined LRO on March 1, 2007. The main question posed to me at that meeting...if an anomaly should impact LRO during its 3-5 day lunar cruise phase, can you create a flight software "patch" (a change to code or data) fast enough to fix the problem, so the LOI burn could take place as planned?
I still have a message I later wrote to management about this, excerpted here: "[They want to know if we can devise a ] "Lunar Cruise Emergency Patch Procedure." (Lunar Cruise is the five-day trip from Earth to the Moon...a mission phase that could lead to loss of mission if something prevents the Lunar Orbit Insertion Burn from going correctly at the end of Lunar Cruise, in which case the spacecraft will pass by the Moon and out into deep space.) I informed [them] that in principle we can accelerate our process, but the result would be increased risk introduced from each stage of the process. Some anomalies could take longer than five days to even understand, much less devise a fix for. I strongly recommended that their primary line of defense should be to test all nominal and contingency Lunar Cruise operations, and we (FSW) could provide only a secondary line of defense."
In a way, this has weighed on my mind for over two years. Finally that pressure is off now that we're safely in orbit. In another post I'll give a quick overview of what I might've done if an emergency had occurred before LOI.