Not only is Ms Big coming to the lab, but also she's sending a QA person from JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
[Carl suggested that I call her Dr Big, which would be appropriate, since I'm referring to her in her professional position in the project. I haven't met Fiona Harrison, yet, but everyone seems to have a lot of respect for her. Nevertheless, I have a 'thing' about calling PhDs 'doctor'. I was originally soured on the practice by meeting a couple of people who insisted on it, which seemed lame. And if I ever go down in the streets like a sack of beans, I don't want Fiona Harrison showing up if someone yells, "Doctor!" I don't even call my MD 'doctor', I call her 'Tracy', although I do say 'Dr Tracy' now and then, if I'm in the mood.]
JPL is a federally funded R&D center in Pasadena. It's managed by Caltech. And that's about all I knew about it before I started this job. The first skinny I heard was from Trish, Carl's wife, who told me that everything at JPL is strictly by the book. Then Ken went there a couple of weeks ago with FM0, and I heard some inside stories.
Ken thought it would take one day to mount FM0, so he planned on two. It turned out he was there for four days, which he found extremely frustrating. A lot of the time was spent idle, waiting for one QA check or another. He said there were usually three or four people working, with four to nine others watching to be sure everything was being done correctly. He speculated that the NuSTAR optics would never be finished if they were being built at JPL. Here's one example.
A torque wrench is a tool that tightens something to a specified tightness, or torque. There are different kinds of torque wrenches, with different sizes, torque ranges, etc., but they all do essentially the same job. There are different ways of setting the desired torque. Probably the most complicated way is shown here:
You turn the knurled part of the handle and the set torque is the value on the shaft plus the value on the turned part that lines up with the center line on the shaft. When you're tightening something and it gets to the right torque, the wrench stops tightening. You could probably teach a 5th-grader in 5 minutes how to use this wrench.
Ken was at JPL and someone had to torque a bolt. There were four people there, all of whom knew how to read the torque wrench. But there was a specific QA person who had to approve the setting on the wrench. They sat and waited over an hour for the QA person. When he arrived, he looked at the wrench, wrote down the value, and work resumed.
I suppose there are good reasons for that kind of care on some projects, but it is kind of anal. The JPL QA guy will probably go nuts when he gets to our lab.
4 comments:
When you lose a $125M mission to Mars because someone used English units rather than Metric units, and another mission returning samples from interplanetary space because someone installed switches backwards (two recent examples), that tends to make organizations somewhat anal in an attempt to prevent stupid mistakes.
On the other hand, QA folks are often easy to make fun of. On one space science project, a scientist with a sense of humor wrote up a procedure to qualify a vacuum tank before flight hardware could be placed in the tank. One of the steps in his procedure was to "apply the eye of newt talisman." All of the cognizant engineers and managers signed off on the procedure without comment. When it came time to use the procedure, the QA guy wanted to know where the eye of newt talisman was, and didn't believe that step in the procedure was a joke! The guy who wrote the procedure was ROTFL, but the managers were just plain pissed off.
Since we're on the subject, why do you think the U.S. is almost the last advanced nation on Earth to switch to the metric system?
Hey, you said "cognizant engineer", which is Ken's title! What does it mean?
That's a hilarious story.
Real men use English units. The fact that NASA is a metric organization (in so many ways!) is just a reflection of how euro-effete they've become. Talk to any Republican and they'll tell you, English units are a sign of American Exceptionalism! You clearly don't know enough Republicans, or you would have already heard this. If you listen to the Right speech long enough, it will begin to make sense.
As to the other thing, I can't tell you what I don't know. But if I did know, and I told you, drastic action would need to be taken. Like, maybe hiring some gremlins to cause glass to shatter when you weren't wearing safety glasses. As a warning.
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