You would think all the early work by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility to counter-act plans for a fully-automated nuclear response on the grounds, basically, that computers are stupid might have taught technocrats something, but it seems not...

Today the National Astronautics and Space Administration announced a project to implement a fully automated IT operations capability for all future space projects.

Both the onboard systems and the ground-based systems will all be under the control of the new infrastructure uniting networks, servers and storage into a self-managing, self-healing unified whole. Neural logic systems will predict and respond to eliminate all need for human inetervention. All events in the environment will be handled, as well as almost all maintenance tasks including operating system upgrades and server farm extensions.

EDS has been given the contract for combining technology from BMC, CA, HP, IBM and seven other vendors into a fully integrated package that will drive off a single CMDB to fully automate control centres in Houston and every one of the five other NASA data centres around the planet, bringing them to lights-out status for the first time.

"The staff savings alone in having zero operators, reduced support staff and almost no network or server engineers will go a long way to paying for the $2 billion cost of the project" said NASA spokesperson April Witling.

"We expect to greatly enhance the stability of the on-board systems of all future spacecraft, including the Space Shuttle after a retrofit this fall, by managing their systems remotely and automatically by the ground-based autonomous event manager being created for us from leading-edge systems management technology by the team at EDS.

"They have drawn people from all the vendor organisations onto the team, giving us levels of cooperation never before seen in the industry. We expect the cross-vendor committee structures we are putting in place will allow us to fast-track the development of these systems while the combined expertise of these companies will ensure the reliability of the result" said Ms Witling.

EDS will employ state of the art best practice in the form of ITIL Version 3 and Prince 2 processes to ensure nothing can go wrong with the design, implementation or deployment of the technology.

The new system is to be known as the Ground/On-board Total Control Holistic Automation, expected to go live in just twelve months from today so note this date.

This mindless faith in technology and now process will be the end of us all. Rise up people! Speak out against this foolery before the skies are raining space junk! Let April 1st 2008 be the day IT professionals everywhere cried enough!