Kirk Kittell

Here are the facts.

Está lloviendo a cántaros en Houston — cats and dogs, baby, cats and dogs;

It is a 1km walk each way to work;

I keep my USB drive attached to my key chain;

My apartment keys are on my key chain;

I used my USB drive at work today, i.e., I plugged it into the computer;

THEREFORE

I had a hilarious 3km walk in the rain after work today because someone – I’m not pointing any fingers — left their apartment keys dangling from their office computer.

Dear Megha,

Without you, I’m nothing but broken pieces of a complete self. I miss you.

Love,
Kirk

P.S.: The chips did not go to waste.

Dear Mr. Lochhead,

Here are a few videos that I described in class on Monday. The real things are always better…

STS-123 Landing [YouTube] - You can start to see the APU plume in infrared at 5:05, a little bit in visible at 5:15, and very clearly near wheel stop at 6:05. The APU plume is normal, happens after every landing. It never looks this cool, though, usually it is invisible. For the flame to appear so clearly, there was a favorable combination of (1) a night landing and (2) very low wind. (The wind would blow the combustible gases away from the ignition source, sort of like trying to light a lighter in the wind.)

Boeing 777 Wing Load test [YouTube] - I was wrong about which aircraft I had seen the wing load test failure. I thought it was the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, but it was actually a Boeing 777. (In this case, think of failure as success — you want to break things in the lab, not in production or flight.)

Rolls Royce Trent 900 Bird Ingestion Test [YouTube] - The title says it all. Bird strike testing is required by the Federal Aviation for several components, including fan blades and windshields, so you can probably find more videos if you look for them.

Dear Ms. Franklin,

I got part of the story right about hydrazine combustion regarding ammonia, but I missed most of it. Now that I can cheat and use my notes, I can tell you that nitrogen and hydrogen products are also produced.

First off, I was wrong about one thing: the Auxiliary Power Unit [NASA] (APU) on the Space Shuttle Orbiter does not use monomethylhydrazine (CH₃NHNH₂) — it uses plain old liquid hydrazine, which is the composition I gave you, N₂H₄. (The Orbital Maneuvering System [NASA], another set of rocket engines on the Orbiter, uses monomethylhydrazine.)

Combustion of hydrazine in the APU occurs without oxygen In space, there is no atmosphere to provide oxygen; anyway, during launch in the atmosphere, combustion is isolated from the environment.

1. 3 N₂H₄ –> 4 NH₃ + N₂
2. N₂H₄ –> N₂ + 2 H₂
3. 4 NH₃ + N₂H₄ –> 3 N₂ + 8 H₂

I was wrong about the catalyst, as well. The catalyst is iridium on alumina, but it is called Shell 405, not Shell 104 — or if you want to be more specific, Shell Corporation stopped making this in 2002, so the new version produced by Aerojet is called S-405.

To both of you: thanks for letting me talk to your classes on Monday. It was fun. Engineers are good folks, but students are more interesting than engineers. I hope you found it useful. If you ever have any questions, email me at kirk.kittell@gmail.com. I can put you in touch with the smart folks that put their hands on this equipment, or can hook you up with more photos or videos, etc., which is even more interesting than listening to me describe it.

(To everyone else: My dad is a principal at Chester High School in southern Illinois. I was hanging out with a few of his teachers — Ms. Franklin and Mr. Lochhead — and students on Monday morning when I was in town.)

Since completing my M.S. at the University of Illinois in May 2006, and before that my B.S. in December 2003, I’ve been carrying a huge pile of binders filled with notes, homework, exams, quizzes, and other ballast from place to place, once from Illinois to Virginia, once within Virginia, and once from Virginia to Texas. They were heavy, required too much volume to store.

Now, I have only one more place to transport all of these papers: to the recycling bin.

After several months of slow work — that’s not months of hard work, but maybe an hour a week — I’ve scanned all of my useful notes and converted them to PDF files. See, I couldn’t just throw the things away. I spent so much time copying and re-copying the notes that I couldn’t toss them all. Plus, some of the notes still come in handy at work, especially the notes for combustion.

If you’re interested in stealing my old notes, I’ve posted them on my wiki. Maybe they could be useful for you.

• AAE 220, Aerospace Structures I
• AAE 221, Aerospace Structures II
• AAE 251, Aerospace Dynamic Systems II
• AAE 306, Orbital Mechanics
• AAE 333, Electric Propulsion
• AAE 350, Spacecraft Attitude Dynamics and Control
• AAE 404, Optimization of Aerospace Systems
• AAE 408, Optimal Spacecraft Trajectories
• AE 514, Boundary Layer Theory
• ASTR 210, General Astronomy
• ASTR 305, Solar System and Interstellar Medium
• MATH 280, Advanced Calculus
• MATH 285, Differential Equations
• MATH 385, Differential Equations II
• ME 501, Combustion

Now, the next time I move to a new place, I can count on having a lighter load to carry. This message brought you by the letter M, as in “My boring life.”

A few photos from the day before the hurricane on Flickr: Hurricane Ike, September 2008.

I’m sitting here in my apartment in Nassau Bay, waiting for Hurricane Ike to arrive. It shouldn’t be long, maybe 24 hours from now. My ZIP code, 77058, got the call for a mandatory evacuation today, but I’m staying. It has less to do with bravado, more to do with my placement relative to the other folks in 77058. The folks in houses need to worry about how high they are above sea level and what comes in or smashes into their front door.

In the event of flooding, for me, the worst I expect from my apartment — 14 feet above sea level at the base — is to see the water below me from my window. I’ll be looking, believe me. I feel safe where I am. Not only am I elevated above the ground, none of my windows face an open area. My largest set of windows face the opposing building in my complex, 20 feet away.

Preparation… this is something I don’t understand. What I expected, as a neophyte in the Houston area, is that the residents were ready for hurricanes. I expected that this was old news for them and that they knew how to pick up and move. Maybe I was just too accustomed to the Texas way of self sufficiency and getting things done. Reading the news — something that should be done with a grain of salt, unless hysterics is your favorite form of information — has been a comedy of empty gas stations and crowded stores. I didn’t expect that.

I went to HEB — that’s Texan for “really awesome grocery store” — on Tuesday evening to get a few items that I might need in case of total post-hurricane apocalypse. I didn’t even have to wait in line to checkout. Today: you might be lucky to get a parking spot at Wal-Mart or the grocery store. After HEB, I went to the gas station a few blocks away, figuring I ought to make sure I had a full tank of gas in case of evacuation. Only one of the twelve pumps was occupied. Today: gas stations were running out of gas because the sixth largest metro area in the US collectively exclaimed, “Oh, crap!” and rushed to the gas stations. It turns out that Texans are just like any other people; they have the same tendency to procrastinate and then break into hysterics under pressure.

Now, if I had a family here, or if I owned a house, I’d probably board up and move out. I would have been gone a day ago. I’m staying here as a bachelor for this hurricane, which is much, much simpler than having to care for a family. I have no envy for those folks. Good luck to you.

The upside of this hurricane, so far, is meeting people in the neighborhood, something I have not done since moving here in early April. Something about staying behind for the hurricane creates a common bond between people; either that, or I don’t look dangerous enough to be a looter. I spent some time on the Nassau Bay side of Clear Lake today, taking photos from the boardwalk, talking to people who didn’t evacuate. I met a guy and his wife who bought their house from the last man on the moon, Eugene Cernan. I met a guy whose primary fixation with the hurricane was a desire to go fishing. I met my next door neighbor. In my hopefully-short-term stint in Houston — no offense, Houston or Houstonians, but my job is devoid of any character and I’m going to leave it as soon as possible — these are the first four people I’ve met here in the neighborhood.

So, wish me luck. And if you have some free time on Friday, keep me company on Twitter or Facebook; I expect the power to be out on Saturday and Sunday, but on Friday I’ll be here and bored. I’d say that I hope the trend of the hurricane track (see: Stormpulse) keeps moving to the northeast, but I’d say it only half heartedly. Someone will get hit by this hurricane no matter where it strikes, and it’s a big one. Why not here?