Not Too Cool

     In the first few days of the Spring heat wave, the air-conditioner coil in the furnace here at Roseholme Cottage froze up.  (I've been calling it an A-coil, but it's got one more section, so it's really an N-coil.)

     That wasn't too great. I managed to catch it early: air was still flowing but the cold side of the coolant line was frosted up nice and white where it's exposed as it goes into the box where the N-coil lives.  I turned the thermostat up several degrees, left the fan running and added a floor fan over the register in the dining room -- that one's only six feet away from the return dust grill, and the system works better if I can loft the cold air up and displace warm air into the floor-level return.

     Tam had out-of-town stuff to do over the next week and a half after I found it and I had several projects at work, so service had to wait.  I figured the system was just low on coolant, which (for abstruse reasons I have neither the time nor the crayons to share my limited understanding of) can make the N-coil tend to get much colder than it it should and freeze up.  In the meantime, I could probably manage it by not cooling the house any more than the bare minimum needed to control humidity.  You have to pay attention to the outside temperature and if the ducts in the basement are sweating, but if the system's not too messed up, it works.  I fired up booster fans in the bedrooms and it worked through a couple of weeks of bad heat.

     Then we had the flea explosion.  I had scheduled service by then, but Tam had to go out of town again and the house was a mess with bags of to-be-de-flea-ed stuff all over, so I cancelled it -- I thought.

     A few days later, the tech knocked while I was in the shower and we had a short, unhappy conversation.  That was early last week.

     After rescheduling and apologies all around, he showed up yesterday morning and worked his magic.  Yes, the system was low on coolant -- but after topping it up, it was still acting funny.  I'd drawn the newest tech; he spent some time on the phone with his more-experienced peers and came back to tell me that either the high-tech self-regulating expansion valve was shot -- or the coil was.  The latter was going to be costly and even the valve would be painful because it's labor-intensive (or time-intensive, at least: they have to empty the system, but refrigerant's too expensive to waste, so it gets pumped down and saved, and that's not a quick process.)

     He left and I called his office for an official quote.  They reminded me that the bill would be less if the system happened to be under warranty.  I asked them to hold that thought, I'd call right back after checking.  Turns out I had registered it back in 2017, and yes, it was a ten-year warranty if you bothered to register.  I called back, and now the service outfit wanted to send another tech out to make sure the problem was as diagnosed.  (I can't blame them for that.  The parts markup on a coil is a nice chunk of change and some or all of that is now off the table.) 

     Early this morning, the previous tech returned, skeptical senior in tow, and they did another round of measurements.  The original guy was vindicated (and happy about it.  It sucks to be the new kid -- BT, DT), and I'm waiting to hear back on scheduling the replacement.

     Meanwhile, we're in another hot streak and I'm managing the thermostat.

Marooned In Space?

     Oh, no!  Sunita Williams and Barry "Butch" Wilmore are stranded (according to headlines) or not stranded (according to NASA) aboard ISS!  What'll they do?

     Ride the Boeing Starliner back down, once the engineers are happy; or hitch a spare pair of seats on a SpaceX Dragon capsule, if the engineers get a lot less happy than they are now.  They're not stranded.  If the price was right, the Russians would probably taxi them home, and gloat about it all the way.  

     The worst problem for the pair right now is ensuring a sufficient supply of underwear (etc.).  There's no laundromat on ISS; they can't even take dirty clothes outside and let the vacuum sterilize them: the resultant particulate matter would stay in orbit and after a few years, ISS and all the scientific instruments it carries would be orbiting in a thin cloud of schmutz. Astronauts, cosmonauts, tourists and whoever else on ISS bring up a suitcase of employer-issued attire, stuff their dirty laundry into the trash, and it gets packed into a disposable cargo vehicle (From Russia, ESA or JAXA, though the latter two may not be flying at present) and burns up on reentry, raining schmutz-laden ashes down on the oceans and great cities of the world.

     The biggest risk they're facing is a shortage of skivvies.  NASA has done detailed studies on just how long you can wear the same set of clothes (ickily long), and resupply flights arrive at regular intervals, so not to worry.

     But what about those thrusters?  The delay seems to stem from some wonky thrusters in the Starliner's Service Module, and the issue there is, that part is not coming home.  It gets discarded along the way and burns up, just like a bag of space laundry.  If there's any chance to figure out what went wrong, it's got to be before the spacecraft heads home.

     And why is there a problem?  Can't NASA just pull out their engineering samples here on Earth and start fooling with them?  Um, about that....  Even when NASA was building their own spacecraft, they weren't building their own spacecraft.  Mostly they were managing the design process, subcontracting construction to a whole flock of companies (Chrysler made big chunks of Saturn V that took us to the Moon!) and managing (and occasionally performing) system integration.  It was all done on cost-plus contracts: do the job, whatever it takes, and send Uncle Sam the bill.  For the commercial crew system that has produced SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing's Starliner,* NASA has stepped back from micromanaging and final assembly; they described the mission and put it up for bid -- at a fixed price.

     SpaceX got in early, using the prototype Dragon capsule and Falcon boosters for the unscrewed resupply contracts and learning as they went.  Boeing -- who had absorbed a lot of other aerospace companies and had immense institutional experience building spacecraft -- went straight into building manned vehicles.  And, as they had always done, they subcontracted a lot of it.  Including the thrusters; those were made by Aerojet Rocketdyne (Owned by L3Harris, itself a child of defense contractor Litton Industries and Harris Intertype, who once made printing presses, broadcast equipment and military communications gear).  This was bigtime commercial spaceship stuff, and Boeing asked for -- and got -- a fixed-price contract from their subcontractors.

     Space is hard.  Rockets break, and they break in many new and unusual ways.  Make a change to an existing system, and it may surprise you; design a new system from the ground up and it will surprise you.  If the engineers are very talented and very experienced, they can anticipate many of the ways things will fail, but not all of the ways.  No one can.  SpaceX uses a "move fast and break things" approach, and it works -- but they suffer occasional dramatic failures and have, so far, been very good at knowing how much risk is acceptable for any given flight.  NASA, in the wake of the Apollo "plugs-out" ground test tragedy, was obsessed with hand-tightening every bolt, having all the contractors follow every step of every part of the work and materials in extreme detail, and it resulted in successful Lunar missions -- at very great cost.  Boeing threw their efforts into engineering and ground-testing -- and in writing careful specifications for the subcontracted subsystems.  When things break, it's a matter for figuring out where, why and how -- and if the failure was due to improper assembly, improper design, or flawed specifications.  Money is riding on the answer -- money and whose pocket it comes out of.  This is not just rocket-geekery; it's attorneys and accountants and managers; it's people's best educated guess on how much it's going to cost to make each widget and how much the prime contractor will pay for it.  Get those numbers wrong and you can eat up a year's profit; get them too wrong, and people die.

     Starliner's woes do not appear to be at the "people die" point.  They have, however, been teetering on the brink of "goodby, profits" for both already-ailing Boeing and some of their subcontractors, and that spaceship its going to to stay up there, docked with ISS, until they have sorted out every valve, bolt, screw, engineering specification, contractual clause and the wounded feelings of the second vice-president in change of making rocketships for money.  It's not very pretty or especially pure; it's not as spectacular as a fully-fueled Falcon blowing up on the launchpad because somebody screwed up the temperature limits of a carbon-fiber-reinforced propellant tank. But it's how big old companies like Boeing do things, and I'm confident they will eventually get it all sorted out.

     Meanwhile, Suni and Butch are rationing their clean socks very carefully.  Because, you see, it only counts as a successful test flight if they come back in the Starliner that carried them up -- and the second V. P. in charge of flying rockets for money will be in a heap of trouble if this doesn't work as planned.
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* And, kind of indirectly, Sierra Space's Dream Chaser. But it's not competing to carry people at present. 

SCOTUS Says So

     I held off posting this morning, waiting to see if the U.S. Supreme Court would release their decision about Presidential immunity, figuring they would thread that needle with great care.

     Based on recent past decisions, it seemed likely the decision was going to work in Mr. Trump's favor, but narrowly.  The Justices are all clever lawyers, I thought, and mindful of theire responsibilities, they'd take care to not leave a mess.

     Was I ever wrong.  Their decision is problematic on many level. Ignore for now the legal troubles of former President Donald J. Trump, and consider the wider angles:

     If you believe President Biden committed crimes, as President or during his terms as Vice-President, well, that's tough; he's almost certainly immune from prosecution for them.

     There's a moral problem with the underlying notion that a President might have to commit crimes in the course of his or her duties: if it's immoral for you or me to do something, it's immoral for a President to do the same thing.  We expect our country's military to fight wars without committing atrocities, war crimes, grave injustices -- and we prosecute them when they fail to abide by these civilized norms, even in battle.  We must ask no less of our Presidents.

     No man should be above the law. Not Donald Trump or Joe Biden or any of their predecessors.  I don't know what the conservative majority on the Court was thinking, but it wasn't very clear thought, and it certainly wasn't with any kind of an eye to Framers or their original intent.

     The United States of America is in trouble now.  I don't know if the damage can be repaired.