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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 3