2024-02-21 - Introducing "Apollo days", some rough scheduling

Project Gemini - the internet protocol one - is officially considered (mostly for the purpose of yearly celebrations) to have began on June 20th, 2019. The original Project Gemini - the space exploration one - was conceived in 1961 and the first capsule flew in 1964, but the important milestone of the first crewed flight happened on March 23rd, 1965, as commemorated by our use of 1965 as the default TCP port number.

Imagine that you printed out two identical very long calendars, each resembling a measuring tape, that is as a long strip with dates marked at regularly spaced intervals, with time consistently moving in one direction. Call one of them the "internet tape" and the other the "space tape". Now suppose that you arrange those two tapes so that June 20th 2019 on the internet tape lines up precisely with March 23rd 1965 on the space tape. Having done this, what does today's date, February 21st 2024 on the internet tape line up on the space tape? I make it to be November 24th 1969. That's right, it's the day Apollo 12 landed on the moon!

Look, I really wanted to make this announcement on October 17th last year which would have aligned with Apollo 11's landing. You know, the first one? I had the idea plenty far enough in advance but when October came around I was unfortunately too preoccupied with other things in my life and I missed it. That's a shame, but I still like the idea enough to announce it now on a slightly less punchy date.

What idea? Well, there are a total of six of these "Apollo days" and even though it's kind of arbitrary and whimsical I thought it would be fun to use them as a scheduling aid for our Project Gemini. In particular, it is now my intent to announce this project to be "complete" on a future Apollo day. That is to say, on one of these days the protocol specification will become permanently frozen forever after. Apollo days prior to that announcement, when I don't think we're ready for that yet, will be days for reflection and planning where I will try to set very specific goals for the next day.

This means Project Gemini will wind down - in a strictly administrative sense only, of course - no later than "Apollo 17 day", which is March 18th 2027. I sure as heck hope it won't take anywhere near that long, but it's kind of nice to at least have an absolute upper limit, and even if it does take that long, it would still mean the project was today roughly 60% complete, i.e. we are in any case "over the hump". I am actually going to be a lot more ambitious and very seriously aim to feel good about making this announcement on the next Apollo day. As you might have heard, Apollo 13 had a problem, and did not land on the moon. Due to this, the interval between Apollo 12's landing ("today" in this weird exercise) and Apollo 14's landing (which will "be" May 8th next year) is the longest interval between any two consecutive moon landings. Apollo 14 day is more than a year away, so that's a good chunk of time to get work done at a comfortable and sustainable pace.

My immediate goal for now is still, as announced in my previous news post last December 30th, to finish up by the end of March the remaining incomplete stuff that I had hoped to finish up by the end of last year (and I hope to make more posts related to those efforts before the end of this month). Once that milestone has been met, I think I will divide the remaining time until Apollo 14 day into two six month blocks of working time (April through September 2024 and then October 2024 through March 2025) followed by just over a month of reflection and pondering. The scope of the first block of working time will essentially be "everything except that whole IRI debacle", with the specific focal points guided by various emails I have received from people in the community plus the still open Gitlab tracker issues (please do not consider this an invitation to spam the issue tracker with last minute feature requests), as well as one surprise I am still holding up my sleeve. The scope of the second block of working time will be exclusively "that whole IRI debacle". Can't wait!

Rest assured there will be other stuff happening this year beside the work outlined in these two blocks. Stay tuned!

For the record, the full Apollo day schedule is as follows:

Apollo 11 day = 2023-10-17

Apollo 12 day = 2024-02-21

Apollo 14 day = 2025-05-08

Apollo 15 day = 2025-11-03

Apollo 16 day = 2026-07-25

Apollo 17 day = 2027-03-18