A retro timekeeper that never was: Apollo-era meters and GPS merge past and present - [Resources_Hands On

Abstract

TWO YEARS AGO, ON THE 48TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE APOLLO 11 LANDING, A CLOTH BAG THAT Neil Armstrong used to return the first lunar samples to Earth was sold at a Sotheby's auction for US $1.8 million. The seller had purchased it online two years earlier for a mere $995—a fantastically good deal for what turned out to be a precious artifact of the Apollo era. • While I wasn't nearly so fortunate, I, too, got a good deal online for some hardware that probably contributed in some way to the Apollo program, though I don't know how exactly. I obtained three vintage analog panel voltmeters for $15 each from an eBay seller who had bought them from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in Huntsville, Ala. • I could tell from their art deco-inspired faces that the three Weston voltage meters were old when I first saw them online, but I didn't know how old. To my delight, I discovered manufacturing dates written on the back of the faceplates. These meters, it turns out, were made between May and December of 1955—and presumably shipped to Huntsville shortly afterward. • At the time, NASA did not yet exist. Huntsville was, however, home to an Army installation, known as Redstone Arsenal, where missiles were being developed. In 1955, Wernher von Braun and numerous other German rocket scientists were hard at work there building rockets as part of the United States' ballistic missile program. This team would build the first U.S. satellite launcher, and later, after the site had become the Marshall Space Flight Center, von Braun and others in Huntsville helped to develop the giant Saturn boosters, which eventually sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon. • Having scored three classy panel meters of some vague historical significance (I can imagine von Braun having peered at their twitching needles), I wanted to do something fun with them. Inspired by a project I had seen on Hackaday, I decided to make a clock that would indicate the hours, minutes, and seconds by deflecting the needle on the analog voltmeters. But I would go a step further than the Hackaday project and combine the modern space age with the old. My clock would be synchronized with the atomic clocks carried on GPS satellites, while still looking like something that would be at home on a rack of instrumentation at some NASA facility during the Apollo program.