If you’ve worked in IT, you’re almost certainly familiar with your company’s "disaster preparedness plan"—every organization of appreciable size has some kind of formalized set of documents detailing what to do in the event of an emergency. Organizations on the Gulf Coast typically include hurricane scenarios in their disaster preparedness plans, and in this respect, NASA is no different from any other large company. Next week, NASA’s Houston-based Johnson Space Center (JSC) will kick off its annual Hurricane Exercise and run through its site’s disaster plan, but the mock storm the staff will be battling won’t be called "Jerry" or "Bob" or something pedestrian—no, JSC will find itself directly in the path of a far more awesomely named tropical cyclone.

"This year's storm is named 'Hurricane Daenerys,'" said JSC Center Operations Directorate Manager Joel Walker in an e-mail to JSC managers announcing the exercise. "Our exercise will feature a new interactive model which will require quick thinking, priority setting, and mitigation strategies from Senior Staff."

For the three or four Ars readers who aren't Game of Thrones fans, "Daenerys" is the name of one of the saga's primary characters—the last surviving child of a murdered king, who plans to return to the land her family once ruled and seize the throne by any means necessary. Also, she has a giant army and three enormous fire-breathing dragons. Due to the circumstances of her birth, she is frequently referred to as "Daenerys Stormborn," and she is not, as they say, a person with whom anyone should mess.

Hurricane prep is serious business for the agency; the Houston area has faced serious storms that spawned mass evacuations twice in the past 10 years, including the mandatory evacuation for Hurricane Rita in 2005—which involved at least 2.5 million people and remains the largest evacuation in US history. When such an event occurs, JSC personnel have a tremendous amount of work to do. In addition to seeing to their own safety, workers have to transition off all of the manned space flight tasks that are normally coordinated out of the center. Most notably, this includes a full shift of International Space Station ground control over to the RKA Mission Control Center in Moscow.

There is also typically a small "ride out" staff left on-site at JSC to triage damage and other emergencies that might arise during the event. However, even the emergency team can be told to evacuate if the storm is serious enough; this happened in 2005 when it appeared that Hurricane Rita might cause catastrophic flooding. JSC is located only a few hundred yards from Clear Lake, which is itself an extension of Trinity Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.

To ensure that the disaster plans can be executed smoothly if and when they’re needed, the agency runs through them yearly in the spring, before the Gulf Coast hurricane season starts. But just because there’s a tremendous amount of seriousness about the planning doesn’t necessarily mean that JSC disaster personnel can’t have a sense of humor about things—which brings us back to the star of this year’s exercise, Hurricane Daenerys.

Ordinarily, the mock hurricanes used in the exercise are given pedestrian names—in the 2010 exercise, for example, the Gulf Coast was pretend-attacked by "Hurricane Mike"—but someone at either the JSC emergency office or the Spaceflight Meteorology group clearly is a George R. R. Martin fan. Ars reached out to several contacts at the agency asking about the name and for past examples of similar whimsy, but none were forthcoming. "I don't remember any of them being funny," noted one source.

We've also contacted JSC's Public Affairs Office to try to get in touch with Center Operations Directorate head Joel Walker, but so far we've had no luck getting a response. We're curious to know who his favorite Game of Thrones character is and whether or not the simulation of Hurricane Danny will include raining blood or rampaging dragons. Although 2005's Base Realignment and Closure led to the reclassification of the city's 147th Fighter Wing as an unmanned reconnaissance unit and the removal of most of the greater Houston area's air superiority fighters, nearby Ellington Field does still play host to the Army's 149th Attack Reconnaissance Battalion and a wing of Apache Longbow helicopters. Whether or not the Longbows' 20mm cannon and antitank missiles would be tactically useful against enraged dragons is unknown.

Update: We've heard back from Joel Walker! Turns out, he actually is a fan! NASA issued the following statement to Ars, noting that Daenarys Stormborn would probably make a great flight controller or astronaut: