Sticking the landing
Techno Talk
Doctor Who once brought Vincent van Gogh to our time to see an
exhibition of his work and to hear himself described as “the greatest
painter of them all”. If I ever get my own time machine working, I’d
love to do something similar for many of the great inventors.
M
ost of the time, we focus
our attentions on the wonders
of the latest and greatest in existing and emerging technologies. So it’s
easy to forget that there’s still a lot of old
technology lurking about.
In industry, for example, we beguile
ourselves with the idea of smart automation and smart machines. We visualise
things like pumps, generators and motors
being equipped with a bevy of advanced
sensors feeding some form of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) that
can perform tasks like detecting anomalous behavior and predicting problems.
However, there remain myriad factories
around the world that are jam-packed
with machines that are as dumb as a
pile of rocks (but still quite effective).
It isn’t just industry either. The US Air
Force’s intercontinental ballistic missile
command, control and communications
network stored critical data on 8-inch
floppy disks until 2019.
You think that’s bad? I just heard that as
part of the German Navy’s current modernization efforts, they’ve decided their
Brandenburg-class F123 frigates are no
longer going to rely on 8-inch floppies
as part of their onboard data acquisition
(DAQ) systems. However, rather than
overhauling the DAQs in their entirety, the solution they’ve come up with
is to create subsystems that emulate
8-inch floppies. I don’t know whether
to laugh or cry!
How big? How heavy?
I once had an interesting chat with
Horst Zuse, the son of Konrad Zuse. As
a young man, Konrad single-handedly
built the world’s first fully mechanical
binary floating-point computer, which
he modestly called the Zuse 1 (Z1).
By 1938, this bodacious beauty was up
and running in his parents’ family room
in Berlin. Konrad went on to create the
world’s first working programmable, fully
automatic, Turing-complete computer.
Known as the Z3, this beast featured
mechanical memory and relay-based
logic. The Z3 was fully operational in
1941, which means the Germans were
well ahead of the Americans and British
on the computing front.
Konrad’s next effort was the Z4. This
Practical Electronics | October | 2024
was only partially completed when
WWII really started to go pear-shaped
for the Germans, resulting in Konrad
and his Z4 being evacuated from Berlin
to a bunker in the Hartz mountains in
northern Germany.
Can you guess who Konrad ran into
in this bunker? It was none other than
aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun.
Wernher was then working on his V2,
the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile. The V2 rocket became the
first artificial object to travel into space
on 20 June 1944. After the war, Wernher
moved to America where his work was
key to the success of the Mercury, Gemini,
and Apollo programs.
During our chat, Horst and I contemplated the conversations that may have
taken place between Wernher and his
father. Wernher would have loved a
small, light, computerized control and
guidance systems that would fit in his
rockets. But Konrad’s computers were
the size of rooms and weighed tons.
Neither Konrad nor Wernher could
have conceived of concepts like semiconductor transistors and integrated
circuits. If only they could see us now!
Rocket boy
Did you ever see the 1999 American
biographical drama film October Sky?
This tells the true story of a coal miner’s
son called Homer H. Hickam Jr.
Inspired by the launch of Sputnik 1
in 1957 and against his father’s wishes,
Homer and his friends started to design
and build model rockets. They won their
school science fair and participated in
the National Science Fair in Indianapolis.
Homer eventually became an engineer working with Wernher von Braun
at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
in Huntsville, Alabama, just a few miles
down the road from the office where I’m
writing this column.
The Eagle has landed
I remember seeing the first landing on
the moon. This was in 1969, when I was
12. I still choke up when I hear a recording of Neil Armstrong saying, “Houston,
Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has
landed”. I also remember feeling sad
when I learned that the first and second
Max the Magnificent
stages of the Saturn V super heavy-lift
launch vehicles used in the Apollo missions fell into the ocean after separation.
As a young lad, I read a lot of science
fiction books, like Rocket Ship Galileo,
Space Family Stone and Space Cadet
by Robert Heinlein.
Maybe that explains why I was so excited and enthused in 2015 when Blue
Origin and SpaceX both demonstrated
vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL)
and recovery of their launch vehicles
after return to the launch site (RTLS)
operations with their New Shepard and
Falcon 9 rockets, respectively.
Did you ever see the Young Sheldon
episode where a representative from
NASA gives a presentation to Sheldon’s
class at school? Sheldon asks why NASA
doesn’t employ VTVL. The NASA guy
says the mathematics is too complicated, so Sheldon opens a new notebook
and starts writing.
Once he’s finished, Sheldon persuades
his dad to drive him to NASA’s Johnson
Space Center in Houston, where he presents his notebook to the guy who said
it wasn’t possible, after which it’s “job
done” as far as Sheldon is concerned.
At the end of the episode, we jump forward in time to a news report showing
a SpaceX Falcon 9 performing a vertical
landing. Then the camera cuts back to
Elon Musk in his office with Sheldon’s
notebook in his hands. When his secretary announces a visitor, Elon quickly
slides the notebook into his desk drawer.
Sticking the landing
I rarely remember what inspires my columns, but in this case, it was an item on
the Hackaday website that set my juices
flowing (https://pemag.au/link/abzc).
There I discovered that, while attending Montgomery High School in New
Jersey, a student called Aryan Kapoor
recently managed to do something that
would have made Homer Hickam and
Wernher von Braun squeal in excitement.
After three years of research, design
and testing, Aryan managed to achieve
vertical takeoff and vertical landing with
a model rocket. This was all made possible by modern sensors and actuators.
It makes me wonder what school kids
will be doing 100 years from now! PE
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