Beyond the Earth's atmosphere

© Mark Ollig

The Space Coast includes the area around Florida's Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Center, NASA's launch site of history-making spacecraft, including Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle.

Through 1963, this launch site was known as Cape Canaveral; however, from 1964 to 1974, it was called Cape Kennedy, in honor of the former 35th president.

Today, it is known as the Cape Canaveral Space Force Center.

The United States Explorer 1 satellite was launched Jan. 31, 1958, from Cape Canaveral using a Juno I four-stage Redstone rocket. It reached a height of 62 miles, which is recognized as the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space. This boundary line is also called the Kármán line and is named after Theodore von Kármán, a mathematician, aerospace engineer, and physicist who determined Earth’s atmospheric altitude boundary in 1957.

Explorer 1 was launched eight months before NASA officially opened its doors for business.

Many people believed Explorer 1 was the first rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, and for a long time, so did I.

After World War II, The United States obtained and modified German V-2 ballistic missiles to work with the US Army's RTV-G-4 (later nicknamed Bumper) and WAC Corporal's hypergolic liquid-fueled sounding rocket.

WAC Corporal’s rocket is used at high altitudes to gather atmospheric data and was designed and manufactured by Douglas Aircraft and the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory, with the cooperation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, founded in 1936, at the California Institute of Technology.

The United States built eight of these rockets, and the first was launched May 13, 1948, from the White Sands Missile Ranch in New Mexico.

In 1950, the Bumper-WAC rocket tests moved to Cape Canaveral, FL.

 A US modified V-2/RTV-G-4/WAC Corporal rocket called Bumper No. 8 became the first rocket launched, from Launch Pad 3 at Cape Canaveral July 24, 1950.

This rocket’s upper stage portion obtained an altitude of nearly 250 miles.

The rocket's V-2/RTV-G-4 ballistic missile's first stage produced 55,000 pounds of thrust at liftoff, while the WAC Corporal's second stage stayed attached.

After 60 seconds, the first stage shut down and separated while creating a high altitude “thrust boost” or bump to the WAC Corporal second stage portion.

The first stage's “bump” pushed the WAC Corporal rocket stage so that when its engine ignited for 45 seconds, it obtained a higher altitude; thus, the rocket nickname “Bumper” was born.

The Bumper Program launched its first six rockets from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The last two Bumper rockets, No. 8, launched July 24, 1950, and No. 7 (delayed) July 29, 1950, from Cape Canaveral, FL.

I just realized, Bumper No. 7 would be the first rocket launch attempt to be “scrubbed” at Cape Canaveral.

The first rocket launched into space was June 20, 1944, when the underground German World War II factory, Mittelwerk, test-fired its MW 18014 German A-4/V-2 rocket from the town of Peenemünde, located in north-east Germany off the Baltic Sea.

The MW 18014 rocket reached a height of 109.36 miles above the Earth.

Wernher von Braun, a German (and future American) aerospace engineer, designed and led the development of the V-2 rocket at Peenemünde.

The US launched a modified V2 rocket equipped with a 35-millimeter motion film camera Oct. 24, 1946, from the White Sands Missile Range. It reached a height of 65 miles within three minutes.

The rocket’s onboard camera recorded the first views of the Earth ever seen from space, and took a new picture frame every second and a half as it ascended above our planet.

After reaching apogee, the modified V2 descended to Earth and crashed; however, a hardened steel case protected the film inside the camera.

A Universal News film of this event can be seen at https://bit.ly/3JuZ9ly.

Sometimes, media in space technology comically quote a 1936 New York Times newspaper article containing: “A rocket will never leave the Earth's atmosphere.”

I have yet to find this newspaper while searching through the archives of the New York Times; however, I did find a New York Times newspaper from Jan. 12, 1920, with a front-page article titled “Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon.”

The 1920 article describes Professor Robert H. Goddard’s testing of “a new type of multiple-charge, high efficiency rocket of an entirely new design.”

“The claim is made for the rocket that it will not only be possible to send this apparatus to the higher layers of the air, including those beyond Earth's atmosphere, but possibly even as far as the moon itself,” the 102-year-old article said.  

The first human-made object reached the moon’s surface, Sept. 14, 1959, 39 years after Goddard’s rocket claim.

Hey, New York Times, have you written a retraction to your 1936 article about a rocket never leaving the Earth’s atmosphere?

The Bumper 8 launch on July 24, 1950 
Source: NASA

The quietest room on Earth

© Mark Ollig

Not many Minnesotans know this, but our state once contained the most soundless artificial chamber in the world.

Sound 80 Studios, located in Minneapolis, began in 1969. During the 1970s, they collaborated with Minnesota’s 3M company, which had invented a multi-track digital recording process using a 1-inch magnetic recording tape.

Portions of Bob Dylan's album, “Blood on the Tracks,” were recorded at Sound 80 Studios in 1974.

Sound 80 Studios recorded Cat Stevens' album, “Izitso,” and the demo tapes for Prince's first album, “For You,” in 1977.

The St. Paul Chamber Orchestra also made recordings at Sound 80 Studios.

In 2006, Sound 80 Studios was listed in Guinness World Records as the “Oldest Digital Recording Studio in the World,” and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2020.

In 1995, Steven J. Orfield, the founder and president of Orfield Laboratories, purchased Sound 80 Studios.

Orfield Laboratories is the nation’s only independent multi-sensory design research lab.

It provides consulting services in acoustics, lighting, audio-visual, perceptual product research, temperature comfort, indoor air quality, building standards, and architectural and occupancy research.

Orfield Laboratories also perform research in applying “human factors,” which is the application of psychological and physiological principles used in engineering.

The benefits of enhanced human factors include safety and comfort, which results in reduced human error, increased productivity, and improved human and technology interactions.

Located at 2709 East 25th St. in Minneapolis, the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories was, until 2015, the quietest and most soundless artificial room on our planet.

An anechoic [pronounced an-e-koh-ik] chamber is a room designed with special coatings and materials to deaden sound and electromagnetic waves by obstructing its reflections.

Certified by Guinness World Records as officially the quietest place on Earth in 2004, the Orfield Laboratories Anechoic Chamber tests measured background noise at an exceptionally low -9.4 dBA.

Note: dB (decibel) unit sound pressure levels are unweighted, and dBA levels are “A” weighted according to weighting curves that come close to how a human ear hears.

Orfield Laboratories measure sound power, vibration transmission, and sound absorption, and provide consulting services across the United States, Canada, and many clients in Europe and Asia.

Company testing of products inside the Orfield Laboratories Anechoic Chamber includes Harley-Davidson's motorcycle bike's trademark-specific audible “exhaust roar” and Whirlpool Corporation's washing machines’ sound levels.

“When it’s quiet, ears will adapt. The quieter the room, the more things you hear. You’ll hear your heart beating; sometimes, you can hear your lungs, and hear your stomach gurgling loudly. In the anechoic chamber, you become the sound,” Steven J. Orfield said.

Orfield Laboratories is a private testing facility not generally open to the public; however, they have three standard tour options, including a brief time to go inside the anechoic chamber.

Tour reservations are $125 per person (with a $250 minimum per tour) and are Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Orfield tours include the history of Sound 80 Studios, Orfield Labs' history, and their work with sensory spatial and product development.

They recently added the Orfield Challenge tour, which confirms an individual's record time inside their anechoic chamber at the cost of $600 per hour per person; any additional time is charged in one-hour increments.

An official “certificate of time” spent inside the anechoic chamber is awarded to each person.

Orfield Laboratories inform anyone signing up for the challenge with the following: “Please do not expose yourself to loud sounds and music for a week prior to your visit, as loud sounds can cause a Temporary Threshold Shift (TTS) that will reduce your hearing sensitivity and your enjoyment of listening to quiet sounds of your body, like your heartbeat, airflow from your lungs, and joint movement.”

Regarding “joint movement,” I get to listen to my knees crackling whenever I stand up, so that is a sound I don’t need to hear from inside the Orfield Laboratories Anechoic Chamber.

The individual record for staying inside an anechoic chamber was accomplished in August 2021, when a person remained inside the soundless room for two hours.

As of 2022, the quietest artificially-built room in the world is inside the anechoic chamber at Microsoft Headquarters in Redmond, WA. Audio tests performed June 10, 2015, showed an average background noise reading of an extremely low -20.35 dBA.

To learn more about touring Orfield Laboratories, send an email request to info@orfieldlabs.com. Its website is located at https://www.orfieldlabs.com.

Orfield Laboratories Anechoic Chamber

We were here

© Mark Ollig

Our sun is about 4.6 billion years old and burns through 600 million tons of hydrogen every second.

Astrophysicists forecast in 3.5 billion years, the sun will become 40 percent brighter, causing the melting of Earth’s ice caps, boiling the planet’s oceans, and the evaporation of all moisture remaining in the atmosphere.

The sun will use up the last of its hydrogen reserves in roughly 5 billion years, expand into a red giant, essentially a dying star, and absorb Mercury, Venus, and in all probability, the Earth.

Earth’s average distance from the sun is 93 million miles.

As we know, nothing lasts forever; however, is there a way to preserve Earth’s data, so it survives our planet’s inevitable ending?

When that eventual demise occurs, all information stored using bits, bytes, quantum qubits, and all other logical structures about our lives here on Earth will be wiped clean.

Of course, regardless of how it is stored, all information will be lost since the planet storing the data will no longer exist.

We need to figure out how to organize and store our planet’s collective information for Earth’s future posterity.

Before Earth’s ending, a future human civilization may have the technology to escape our planet’s unavoidable fate and travel, along with all of our collective data history, to a habitable Earth-like planet outside our solar system.

So, does anybody have any ideas on how to future-proof archive our planet’s data?

In 2011, I wrote a column about optical storage discs manufactured with semiconductor substrate materials by Millenniata Inc.

Millenniata’s M-DISC is genuinely remarkable, reliably archiving data recorded on them for 1,000 years.

However, we need a longer-lasting storage medium.

What about storing data using glass?

Some of my readers may recall a past column about glass-storage technology developed by Hitachi electronics using a laser beam to generate coded digital data onto a thin quartz glass.

Hitachi states 40 megabytes of data on one square inch of quartz glass would last 100 million years.

While 100 million years is better than 1,000, we are still faced with the impending doom of our precious data in 3 to 5 billion years.

How can we save from an impending interplanetary galactic disaster billions of years in the future, all information generated by this planet’s civilization?

Maybe I am thinking too far into the future and need to look into the past.

Forty-five years ago, we did not have the technology to send humans to another solar system; however, we could send two spacecraft into interstellar space.

In 1977, two NASA Voyager spacecraft atop Titan-Centaur rockets lifted off at Cape Canaveral, FL.

Each spacecraft contains a message, or note-in-a-bottle if you will, with information about Earth and the lives of its people.

Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on Sept. 5.

Voyager 2 needed to launch first because of its required space travel path trajectories calculated by NASA.

Today, Voyager 1 and 2 are operational and continue traveling further away from Earth and our solar system.

Each Voyager spacecraft is 66 feet long, 12 feet wide, 7.5 feet tall, and weighs 1,700 pounds.

Voyagers 1 and 2 have the best chance of escaping unharmed, our solar system’s eventual celestial cataclysm.

Information about Earth and its people is attached to each Voyager spacecraft on a protected 12-inch round gold-plated copper phonographic disk called the “Golden Record.”

Each Golden Record contains recorded sounds, diagrams, images, and text from our world.

They also show our planet’s location within the Milky Way galaxy and images of Earth’s numerous landscapes, cities, farms, buildings, people, airplanes, spacecraft, and vehicular traffic.

Human greetings spoken in multiple languages, music, birds singing, and other unique sounds and images of how people lived on Earth are also recorded.

A drawing instructs any extraterrestrial intelligence that finds the Voyager on how to retrieve the information from the Golden Record.

A stylus, cartridge, and instructions needed to play the Golden Record are fastened to the spacecraft.

Voyager 1 is currently 14.5 billion miles from Earth and travels through interstellar space at 38,100 miles per hour.

In 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light-years (9.3 trillion miles) of a star known as “AC+79 3888” in the constellation of Camelopardalis.

In 1977, astronomers and scientists believed this star might have planets nearby possessing an intelligent civilization.

NASA is still receiving Voyager 1 and 2’s telemetry data and can send commands to both via the Deep Space Network and will until 2036.

Today, both Golden Records containing information about our existence continue their journey through interstellar space, away from Earth and its solar system.

“Both Golden Records are highly likely to survive at least partially intact for a span of over 5 billion years,” said Nick Oberg of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands.

NASA’s Voyager Mission Operations Status Report on both spacecraft can be seen at https://go.nasa.gov/3C5MBOu.

“Voyager the Interstellar Mission” web page is http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.

Contents of the Golden Record can be seen at https://go.nasa.gov/3tF0RKr.

It is hoped, someday, a logical, reasoning intellect will discover one of the Voyagers, decipher and understand the information on the Golden Records, and know “we were here.”

Each Voyager spacecraft carries a copy of the Golden Record.
The record's protective cover, with instructions for playing its contents, is shown at left.

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched from Earth in 1977. 

Apple’s ‘Magic Keyboard’

© Mark Ollig

It began in 1976 as Apple Computer Company. The following year, their name became Apple Computer, Inc.

In 2007, the company shortened it to Apple Inc.

To most of us, they are known as Apple.

Feb. 24, Apple filed a new patent application with the US Patent Office titled “Computer in an Input Device.”

A future Apple Mac will find its computing and various control ports housed inside an input device; the keyboard.

In their patent filing, Apple says moving a desktop “can be inconvenient, awkward, and difficult, especially when frequently repeated.” Of course, this is no surprise to those of us who own a desktop or tower computer system.

Apple also stated that its specially designed keyboard would balance the new computer’s power and portability functions.

When folks in the computer industry began calling the future Apple Mac the “magic keyboard,” I started reminiscing about a specific computer from 40 years ago.

Some of us are old enough to remember the Commodore 64 home computer manufactured in 1982 by Commodore Business Machines.

Instead of a standard large desktop housing unit, much of the computer’s electronics and ports were inside its alphanumeric full-size keyboard case.

In 1982, we didn’t call the Commodore 64 a “magic keyboard;” however, because of its boxy rectangular shape and beige-colored plastic housing, people sometimes called it a “breadbox.”

Most of us thought it was high-tech looking, with its 66 dark brown plastic capped typing keys, and yes, it seemed somewhat magical, being the Commodore 64 didn’t require the computer desktop case.

The Commodore 64 was displayed during Chicago’s 1982 CES (Consumer Electronics Show).

Back then, I didn’t own a Commodore 64; I had a Sinclair ZX81 computer at home and used an IBM 5150 personal computer at work.

However, I had played some games on the Commodore 64 and was tempted to buy one. It was priced at $595 in 1982, which equals $1,712 today.

It was nicknamed “C64” because it contained 64KB (kilobytes) of Random Access Memory (RAM).

Those who owned a C64 may remember playing games such as Visible Solar System, Radar Rat Race, Pitt Stop II, Ace of Aces, and Jupiter Landing.

The Commodore 64 was primarily a gaming machine. However, it also had a collection of educational and office productivity applications, including word processing and an electronic spreadsheet.

Its operating system was Commodore’s proprietary BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) version 2.0.

Inside the C64 was a MOS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) Technology, Inc. integrated circuit containing an 8-bit 6510 central processing unit running at a clock speed of around 1.0 MHz.

MOS Technology, Inc. was headquartered in Audubon, Pennsylvania, and discontinued its operations in 2001.

The Commodore 64 was in direct competition with the Apple II, Atari 800, Radio Shack TRS-80, and IBM PC.

Around the mid-1980s, the C64 became the best-selling home computer.

I read an estimated 22 million Commodore 64 computers sold between 1982 and 1994.

The C64 included two game controller ports, TV video and audio output connectors, a cartridge memory expansion slot, and a serial connector for a printer or external disk drive.

In addition, using an edge-connector interface with the Commodore 64’s Datassette Recorder (cassette tape unit), the user could store computer programs and data.

Many were drawn to the C64 because of the games, but they soon discovered it could do more than just gaming.

The C64 user could connect the C64 to a telephone line using Commodore’s VICMODEM cartridge, dial into a computer Bulletin Board Service (BBS), and communicate with others online.

A Commodore 64 user could also use a modem to call the online CompuServe network. Their 1982 advertisement noted using the C64 “to get news updates, stock quotes, electronic mail, or computer shopping.”

Folks also used the C64 to learn computer programming.

The storage medium primarily used with the Commodore 64 was a 5¼-inch floppy disk inserted into a peripheral disk unit. The C64 contained no internal hard drive.

After 40 years, the Commodore 64 remains popular with computer hobbyists and even made a resurgence in 2011, when a completely new Commodore 64 was manufactured.

The 2011 Commodore 64x was factory-made using its original keyboard model appearance on the outside, with modern technology packaged on the inside.

Instead of the original 64 kilobytes of RAM, the new C64x had 2GB of DDR3 (double-data-rate 3) RAM and a 1.8 GHz dual-core Atom 525 central computing processor.

The Commodore 64x computer came equipped with a 250GB (gigabyte) built-in hard drive, which is not bad for 2011.

I don’t know of any other classic computer from the 1980s or the 90s having been modernly remanufactured.

You can open a PDF file containing a color brochure advertisement of the original Commodore 64 computer from 1982 at https://bit.ly/3hlJ1q9.

To see the Apple US Patent Office filing “Computer in an Input Device,” check out https://bit.ly/3BZWKMK.

Who knows? Apple’s future computer in a keyboard may end up working like magic.

Commodore 64 home computer advertisement photo from 1982