Killing Time

[hatman]

Tonite is my 6th consecutive night remotely providing second shift support for NASA Mission Control (Houston). It's even worse tonite since my partner had to step out for 5 hours. He's due back with food in a few minutes.

So I said that I am supporting Mission Control... what I am REALLY doing is supporting the representatives from our company who are in Mission Control supporting our Customer who is supporting the people running the actual mission. The first thing that our Lead Systems Engineer asked me to to do was to finish filling in a table from the last 48 hours of data.. they were doing it by hand and slowly (it took them 2 hours to crunch the first 12 hours of data). Enter the Excel Guru and complete it in 15 minutes. Ho hum. What am I goign to do with the REST of my shift until midnight.

So our equipment is basically running nominally... but the piece of hardware that our customer built (why oh why didn't they contract us for this?) is pretty flaky. Their equipment performs the first step of processing Space Station urine, which is provided to our hardware (in combination with condensate from Station Envvironmental Systems) which our hardware then turns into potable drinking water. It's the maiden voyage for both pieces of equipment (Me and 60 other employees from our company got to got to KSC and watch the actual launch... SO COOL). Since our WPA gets like 90% of it's influent from the Urine Processor (UPA) you can imagine that we are pretty much twiddling our thumbs as they try to troubleshoot on orbit. The UPA is currently limping along, but without it, our system can't get enough influent to process and demonstrate proper performance. We've got a HUGE award fee riding on a successful performance, but it indirectly depends upon factors beyond our control. Who knows how that is going to go down.

Ugh...

 

[Greg Truby]

And here I would have thought that you could have slipped a couple of cases of blueberry juice onto the shuttle to help things along.

 

[hatman]

hey Greg... as long as you are on... can you help me on This Thread

 

[mattrx731]

Is this what you're working on?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27907961

 

[hatman]

Yes and no. The Urine processor performs the first step of turning urine into drinking water. It was designed and built by our customer, Marshall Space Flight Systems. We designed and built the next piece of the puzzle, the Water Processor, which takes the semi-processed water from the UPA and then turns it into potable drinking water. Myself and some of our employees who are in Houston right now have been helping Marshall to troubleshoot teh UPA, mostly because we need that unit working to demonstrate ours. So yes, I;ve been working on it, but I am not responsible fo rthe portion that isn;t working.

 

[VoG]

You have my sympathy but at least I suppose you were warm and dry.

I spent most of today shivering in a damp field in the middle of nowhere observing the installation of a flexible riser pipe in a borehole. We subsequently plan to test the water for the leaching of unwanted chemicals from the riser.

I could have done with your device - as it was I had to go behind the bushes

 

[Lewiy]

You have my sympathy but at least I suppose you were warm and dry.

I spent most of today shivering in a damp field in the middle of nowhere observing the installation of a flexible riser pipe in a borehole. We subsequently plan to test the water for the leaching of unwanted chemicals from the riser.

I could have done with your device - as it was I had to go behind the bushes

At least you didn't have to worry about your tool kit floating off though!