Space Junk with William Crowe
Season 2, Episode #10
Season 2, Episode #10
Welcome Season 2 Episode 10
There are currently over 2100 satellites in space and this number is growing fast. Expected to reach over 50,000 by 2030!
People who’ve just always wanted to build their own satellite… and so they don’t necessarily have a great plan to utilise their satellite….
We think … people (are) putting up too many satellites
The more satellites that enter space, the more space debris there is.
There are a lot of satellites going offline, where debris could have been the issue that caused the problem
William Crowe is an Aerospace Engineer from High Earth Orbit Robotics and is working to clean up space.
Australia is very interested in being a responsible player in space and making very rigorous national rules and regulations
Extra discussions during the episode
Advice for engineers just starting out:
Motivate yourself and keep that in your mind and remember often why you got motivated to become an engineer in the first place
An engineer to admire:
developed rockets during the Nazi era, which is quite infamous of him
About Meg Panozzo
William is a Bachelor of Engineering in Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering as well as holding a PhD in Aerospace Engineering from UNSW Sydney.
He has won the Australian Space Research Conference’s Goldfish startup competition, and won several international awards for his research, including the competitive Space Generation Advisory Council “Move an Asteroid” scholarship.
William is a Co-founder of High Earth Orbit Robotics, a company with a long term vision to utilise asteroid resources and inspect and resolve anomalies on satellites in orbit.
Connect with us
Website: www.engineeringheroes.com.au
Facebook: @Engineering.Heroes
Instagram: @Engineering.Heroes
LinkedIn: Engineering Heroes
Twitter: Engineering Heroes
Mel & Dom De Gioia, Your Hosts
This is a “close” copy of the words that were spoken during the Podcast, Season 2 Episode 10.
It is not 100% accurate.
The guest was William Crowe
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Mel De Gioia 0:27
Hi, welcome to season two episode 10 of Engineering Heroes, a podcast that presents incredible engineers that are shaping our society and battling our challenging issues. My name is Mel and my co-host is Dom.
Dom 0:41
So Mel random question, but it will make sense soon. Do you like Star Wars or Star Trek?
Mel De Gioia 0:47
Actually a fan of both but Star Wars is a little bit closer to my heart.
Dom 0:53
Well, our guest today discovered Star Wars at the age of 12. And while most of us enjoyed the movie, he was inspired to create the space craft he saw. Even though his year 6 teacher told him he needed to become a celestial mechanic. He worked it out and received a Bachelor of Engineering and aerospace Aeronautical and Astronautical engineering, as well as earning a PhD in aerospace engineering all from the University of New South Wales.
Mel De Gioia 1:16
Our guest has won the Australian space research conferences, gold fish startup competition, as well as several international awards for his research, including the competitive Space Generation Advisory Council, “moving an asteroid” Scholarship.
Dom 1:32
While he was working on his PhD, he was also building a company. He’s the co founder of High Earth Orbit Robotics, a company with a long term vision to utilise asteroid resources and inspect and resolve anomalies on satellites in orbit.
Mel De Gioia 1:46
Don’t worry, we’ll get into the details what that actually means.
Dom 1:49
Our guest today is William Crowe.
Mel De Gioia 1:51
So we actually met William a few months ago, when Dom and I were asked to host a panel discussion about the issues experienced by startups in space.
Dom 2:02
It was a great night and I felt we really learned a lot about some of the barriers to entry for those very niche entrepreneurs. William was actually on the panel and shared some of his lessons and insights into starting up his company High Earth Orbit Robotics, but tonight, we are going to be talking about startups in space.
Mel De Gioia 2:19
Well, startups in space does sound pretty cool.
Dom 2:21
This topic kind of came out when we were speaking with Phil Wilkinson back in episode eight of season two. Phil spoke to us about the fact that engineers made marvellous advancements for society in the space of refrigeration. However, this has led to being the number one cause of climate change. William’s topic is similar, in that there are so many people keen on getting their satellites into space. But there isn’t that long term consideration of the life cycle. By advancing into space the way society currently is, are we doing more harm than good?
Mel De Gioia 2:54
But before we get too far into that, let me get back to William. He was firmly cemented into the Star Wars camp and had a serious drive to build spacecraft. However, there was a slight problem. You see, unlike a number of engineers we speak to Will had a very strong dislike for mathematics.
Dom 3:13
Thank God, it’s not just me.
Mel De Gioia 3:14
No, no Dom, it’s not just you.
Guest 3:16
I continued to be bad at science and maths for another two years. And then I took an astronomy class at high school. And then suddenly, my grades went from, you know, about 50/60%, up to 100%. And I was like, “wow, I’m good at science”. And so there just wasn’t the motivation there. So once the motivation came, it was like, wow, I can actually be an engineer and produce these amazing spacecraft that I saw in Star Wars and the rest is history.
Mel De Gioia 3:49
Well, that’s great, because I wanted to be a fighter pilot. But I did not have the physics background. Or the know-how to get me there. So well done on having a dream. And actually, finding that you can do it. That’s awesome.
Guest 4:02
I’m sure you can do it, too. It’s all motivation, so if you’ve got the motivation.
Dom 4:08
So just to jump in with this question early. In your industry is there a massive rift in regards to Star Wars and Star Trek? Or is it a case of “I’m sorry, you people are in Star Wars. I can’t work with you. I’m gonna go work with companies that are into Star Trek?”
Guest 4:28
there is certainly a rift. And it’s it is real. And I think I think that the event that we were both at a couple of months ago now, there was, in fact, people in the audience that like neither Star Wars, nor Star Trek Yeah.
Mel De Gioia 4:44
Yeah, so you come out of university. What’s one of the first projects that you were working on then?
Guest 4:50
After finishing undergrad? Well, I was a mechanical engineer. And actually, a lot of aerospace engineers have this issue in Australia, it’s still today. I think its improved slightly. But something like 80 to 90% of aerospace engineers that graduate don’t get a job for many months afterwards. And it’s mainly because there aren’t many aerospace jobs in Australia. But there’s a lot of people studying aerospace engineering. It’s so exciting.
Mel De Gioia 5:19
Yeah. Making rockets and the next Star Wars.
Guest 5:25
They want to do that. I mean, there’s will, not many jobs?
Mel De Gioia 5:30
So what did you find yourself doing?
Guest 5:33
Well, actually, I got a job in the railways, I was working for what became Sydney Trains. And I was working on what we call hot box detectors, which is where you have infrared sensor on the train tracks, and it looks up at the wheels. And it gauges what the temperature of the wheels are as they pass. And sometimes they can get so hot that they become molten and the train literally comes off the track.
Mel De Gioia 6:03
Is it only at certain points that you’re measuring that,
Guest 6:06
yeah, so that’s, as you know, 20 sites around Sydney, mainly where there’s big cargo trains, the big heavy trains. And you’re looking out as they approach Sydney, to make sure they don’t pull off the tracks, and then hurt people.
Mel De Gioia 6:22
So what was your actual role there?
Guest 6:24
So I did a few different things there. I started out as a maintenance engineer. And then I became a project manager. And then I became a implementation engineer. So when all all through the lifecycle worked with the maintenance guys worked with getting new systems implemented, and then worked with getting older systems implemented that have been kind of stuck being implemented for five years. And it cost 10s of millions of dollars more than it should have to implement.
Mel De Gioia 7:03
Okay, how long were you in that role for?
Guest 7:06
I was doing that for a couple of couple years?
Mel De Gioia 7:10
Where are you working right now?
Guest 7:12
I started a company during my PhD, actually. So I was working on that little bit during the PhD, but they’re very incompatible, you can’t do both at the same time. Yeah. So it’s my, my company is High Earth Orbit Robotics, I’m CEO and a co founder, as well. And what we do is we take images of satellites in space. And we do that from space based cameras. And the reason that we do that is that it’s not always correct lighting conditions, or you can’t necessarily get into the right spot when you’re on earth looking up. But when you’ve got another space-based camera, you can use those orbits to get exactly where you need to be. And at the crucial time,
Mel De Gioia 7:59
what are you taking photos of?
Guest 8:01
So at the moment, it’s it’s largely other satellites.
Mel De Gioia 8:05
I thought that’s what you said. So you it’s it’s like a satellite taking photos of another satellite.
Guest 8:10
Yeah. Which isn’t done that much at the moment for various reasons. There are some places where photos are taken of satellites, but not many at this point. So we’re really trying to change that paradigm.
Mel De Gioia 8:21
Why do you need to take photos of satellites?
Guest 8:24
Well, satellites, I mean, they get lost. And, but probably a bigger problem is that sometimes satellites explode, and when they explode they create more debris and they create a bigger, bigger threat to other satellites, which is a terrible situation. So there’s talk of whole orbits becoming unusable because satellite might explode in that orbit. And the debris just kind of spreads around in a kind of like, you know, the rings of Saturn or Jupiter, kind of like that. But around Earth, you don’t want that to happen.
Mel De Gioia 9:02
You take the photos of the satellites to determine how they going or to do the sort of whole Lost & Found programme, that sort of thing.
Guest 9:12
So to do the Lost and Found and then to do, you know, asset management as well. So it’s not really done well for space at the moment. And that’s because you just had no way of looking before, but now we’re changing that paradigm. And so we’ll be able to give people health checks and really understand what’s happening to this satellite.
Mel De Gioia 9:31
Kind of like a Private Investigator for the space industry?
Guest 9:35
Well, we, we like to think of ourselves more like NRMA. But yeah. Private Investigator is fine. Yes.
Mel De Gioia 9:45
So you take the photo and you say “Is this your satellite”, is that kind of what happens?
Guest 9:50
Yeah, well, we do some smarts behind it as well. So we have some image recognition software that we use and some machine learning algorithms that we use to help determine what features on the satellite belong to features in a photo compared to like a 3d model, for example.
Dom 10:11
So is it you launch.. they’re your satellites, that have been launched to take the photos?
Guest 10:17
We haven’t launched any of our satellites yet. So at the moment, we’re using other people’s satellites to understand what’s happening.
Mel De Gioia 10:26
So they have the capacity to take photos for you.
Guest 10:28
They do that. I mean, they need a lot more software and smarts done, and they need to know what orbit they need to be in. And that’s something that we do on our end. And then we kind of work with different operators to give those details so they can take the right photo at the right time.
Dom 10:44
That’s awesome. So I know I do a bit of reporting and auditing, but you’re auditing sounds far more fun. I’m assumming, you’re shooting passes much faster, right, as well. As buildings don’t tend to move too much. It’s pretty easy. You can go in there and check out what’s going on.
Guest 11:08
Yeah, it’s good to have a stationary target, if possible. Yes. It’s kind of weird being an entrepreneur because you your main job is selling products rather than engineer you think it’s going to be engineering, but it’s not. There is there are glimpses of very interesting work in my day job right now in my entrepreneurial world. So I develop orbits for spacecraft. And I find orbits that’s extremely exciting.
Mel De Gioia 11:39
Oh, really?
Guest 11:40
Yeah. And I think what’s really crucial about all this is that they’re so necessary to get whatever piece of kit you want, to wherever, wherever it needs to be to do whatever it needs to do. So without obits, you’re kind of stuck zooming around space listlessly. And you need to know where you’re going.
Dom 12:01
So with all the satellites that are up there at the moment, are buzzing around. What sort of numbers are we talking about? Do you have a rough idea of how many satellites are in orbit at the moment?
Guest 12:13
Absolutely. Well, it’s interesting, because there are active satellites and inactive satellites and space debris, as well. But there’s about 2100 active satellites today, right. And that’s going up rapidly. So it should be around 50,000 in 2030
Dom 12:29
50,000! That’s a lot of stuff buzzing around, making sure that you’ve got the maths correct in regards to where it’s coming and where it’s meant to be going.
Guest 12:40
Yeah, well, the funny thing about space is that if you get it a little bit wrong, so you know, you’ve got maybe 10, significant figures. And if the last one’s are wrong, that can make a huge difference to your entire position,
Mel De Gioia 12:55
Do you need to know where everything else in space is. So you can… so you don’t accidently put it in orbit and then you accidently smash into something else. Do you need to know what everything else is?
Guest 13:05
Well, you want to know where everything else is. Whether that’s realistic, has been a little difficult. So something that we do as a company is we try and help people identify where things are, and what they are as well, because once something’s in space, and if you lose track of it, you might not know which object belongs to you. It’s real problem, it is messy.
Dom 13:31
It’s a very large area out there, to try to find it.
Guest 13:34
Finding it again is very, very hard. There’s, there’s a couple of hundred different objects, which you know, should belong to somebody, but people don’t really know who’s is whose anymore.
Dom 13:48
And suppose it’s one of those things as well with the amount of money it costs to get it up there. You can’t just go, Oh, well, let’s just check another one up there, it will be fine.
Guest 13:56
You’d think that, but sadly, that’s been a business model.
Dom 13:59
Oh, really.
Guest 14:00
The model has had to be so large in order to absorb those risk costs. And it’s, it’s just not sustainable though. When you’re going to 50,000 satellites, you should know what everyone’s doing, make sure they have a purpose. And if they don’t do something about de-orbiting those.
Mel De Gioia 14:21
I just wanted to take a small moment there. When we come back, William will be talking about what it’s going to be like as more and more satellites get launched into space. And why this is going to be a serious issue if you haven’t already guessed. But first, I wanted to let you know what Dom and I have been up to. You see, since changing our name to Engineering Heroes, we have really stepped up our game. You’ll notice on our website that we have a support tab. Now. That’s the place to go. If you want to do things like show you support for our podcast by giving us a one off donation. You could buy some snazzy t shirts with some technical engineering type images on them. I’ll be updating those images every so often. And if you’ve got an idea, please just drop me a line of what you’d like to see. And we’ve even got a book club, where we’ve put a variety of books that our guests have pointed out to us. Now this is all great. But even this week, I’ve done more. I have launched our Facebook group, We Are Engineering Heroes, that’s what it’s called. We Are Engineering Heroes, it’s a place that you can go to discuss your engineering journey with other engineers. And you can just be your beautiful engineering self, you can join up by going to www.engineeringheroes.com.au/FacebookGroup. And Facebook group is all one word. You can also see that link, if you go to our website, www.engineeringheroes.com.au And it’s under the get in touch section. I hope to see you there. Be sure to introduce yourself. Now. Back to William and his quest to clean up space.
Guest 16:02
It’s a huge topic in the space engineering community. So it’s something a lot of people think about. And there are a lot of satellites going offline, where debris could have been the issue that caused the problem. One of the problems we have is that there’s no one to investigate after the fact what happen either, so that’s something we’re hoping to do as well in the future is look at a satellite and see was the debris that caused the problem, or was it another issue? But at the moment, we just have no way of knowing if it’s debris or something else.
Dom 16:36
Is there any legal requirement for the owners of the satellites to clean up the junk once it goes offline? Or it explodes? Or is it just a case of? Well, good luck?
Guest 16:48
Well, there are requirements before you launch to have a plan for end of life. But they’re not necessarily that good, considering how many more satellites are going up. For example, if you’re in low Earth orbit, which is where the majority of the new 50,000 satellites will be in, then you’ve got a requirement to or suggestion to do de-orbit within 25 years. For 25 years, not doing anything, being a useless piece of space junk, it could cause some serious damage during that time. So the laws were written for a different time, and then not that effective anymore.
Mel De Gioia 17:26
Are they globally agreed laws as well? Or? Or is this like just in Australia?
Guest 17:31
No
Mel De Gioia 17:33
I didn’t think so.
Guest 17:36
So there’s a lot of talk about making globally accepted laws. But there’s a lot of geopolitics involved as well. And at the moment, it’s country by country. So Australia is very interested in being a responsible player in space and making very rigorous national rules and regulations. But we can’t impose that on other countries
Mel De Gioia 17:57
is there a sort of global body where they can pull together an accord or something along those lines.
Guest 18:04
Sadly, not really. So in space, the the only global body that we have is the International Telecommunications Union. And they, they kind of parcel out spectrum to different people around the world. But other than that there’s no real central body that can look after this.
Mel De Gioia 18:27
And I’m kind of picturing a whole bunch of car crashes in space. Because… Sure, you can plan to the orbit. But then if you accidentally.. if one satellite accidently runs into another satellite, just through accidental thing, you can’t really then change the trajectory of those space pieces to come back to Earth. So I don’t see how this can work.
Guest 18:54
Well, I think that’s a really good point. a whole range of active… what we call active debris removal solutions have been suggested. So harpoons? Yes. Yeah, there are nets as well. Kind of, spraying up gases in front of debris. So kind of de-orbits through the heating the air molecules, I guess. Or getting a grapple with say, you have a little robot that comes up, sidles up and then grabs it. So all of these suggestions, none of those have worked particularly well. yet.
Mel De Gioia 19:31
When you’re launching things nowadays. Is it a case of you, you’re creating the satellites that are tougher than before? And so you constantly building tougher satellites, is that’s what’s happening.
Guest 19:44
Unfortunately, the the toughness doesn’t matter too much, because the maximum velocity that you can hit another satellite is about 14 kilometres per second. So that’s when they come in head on. So and I mean, when 2 cars
Dom 20:02
Per second…
Guest 20:04
Anyway, when 2 cars crash coming at like.. what, a hundred metres per second. Either way I was on it. I’d say it’s an order or two orders of magnitude higher. Yeah.
Mel De Gioia 20:17
It’s really fast.
Dom 20:18
Very fast.
Guest 20:19
Really fast. Yeah. That’s right.
Dom 20:21
Is that part of the reason why they they’re also … that whole nanotechnology side of things where they’re trying to make them as small as possible to hopefully make the the object that you’re trying to… make it a little harder to hit, I suppose.
Guest 20:34
Yeah, no, you’re right, so it decreases… So the probability of collision decreases linearly with the area that you have. So nanosatellites, much less area. So yeah, you’re right? Absolutely.
Mel De Gioia 20:48
Are you looking to put more satellites up there yourself.
Guest 20:55
We are looking to put our own satellites up as well. So what we found is that using other people’s satellites is a good way to start. But it’s not a great way to get the imagery we need to help our customers. And so we’re looking to build and launch our own satellites as well. So we can put the parameters in place that we need to take those crisp images that will, you know, help identify a satellite right away or help, you know, health check a satellite right away.
Mel De Gioia 21:22
So how are you going to ensure that your satellites don’t turn into space trash?
Guest 21:26
Yeah, because this is, you know, we’re trying to help solve the problem. The first thing that we do is try and launch as few satellites as possible. So what’s happened up till now is that people were looking down at Earth, so a 2d kind of plane wrapped around on sort of sphere. And they try and add more satellites to the constellation to get more of the earth covered for a period of time. Now, when you’re looking at 3d space, like we are, so we want to get to anywhere within this 3d volume, rather than a 2d area, the problem just expands exponentially. And you can’t allow that number of spacecraft to look at other spacecraft, just it goes out of control you looking at a million spacecraft, which is stupid. So what we do, instead, we use swarm technologies to use very few spacecraft to get to the points where we need them to be. And to do that, in kind of a network. So you have the little bits of the network going out when they need to go to get the right information that you need. That reduces the number of spacecraft you need, then the second one, we we have a very good end of life strategy as well. So we have little thrusters that we plan to have on our spacecraft. And we intend to use those with plenty of thrust so we can zip down towards the earth and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, rather than creating more debris and when our spacecraft are too high, so some of them we plan to have quite high. So away from us hemisphere. So hard to burn off. We actually want to use those to zip out to asteroids that pass very close to Earth, and kind of take images of the asteroid. So instead of being orbiting around the Earth, they’ll be kind of orbiting near an asteroid out of harm’s way to other people but also collecting this important information about our nearest neighbours.
Dom 23:24
Right. I can imagine this is an industry that’s just, it’s really just starting, isn’t it? It’s it’s probably going to explode exponentially over the coming years.
Guest 23:32
Probably Yeah. Yeah. I mean, already, the number of satellites is exploding. So that’s really why people have to come up with these new solutions to really help combat this for sure.
Mel De Gioia 23:43
Are you finding there are cowboys out there.
Guest 23:46
Yes, definitely.
Mel De Gioia 23:48
Like ‘Yeah, we’ll put another one out there” and just causing more problems.
Guest 23:51
Yes, so. There’s cowboys. But there’s also dreamers so there’s a lot of people who’ve just always wanted to build their own satellite. And so they don’t necessarily have a great plan to utilise their satellite. So we think there’s people putting up too many satellites as well. And that’s a problem too.
Mel De Gioia 24:08
Is there any movement towards the global control of this
Guest 24:12
the geopolitics is difficult, but there’s a lot of scientists and engineers getting together every year. So next month, I’ll be at a big conference called the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, DC. And there’ll be many conversations about space debris and the problems associated with that for sure. Yeah.
Mel De Gioia 24:32
And is that the only… What do you see is the bigger solution to the whole thing? So you’re going to take responsibility for your own actions, which is, great, that’s right. But this is a bigger problem than just us. Is there something that’s on a grander scale that you could think of as a solution
Guest 24:49
I would, I would love for there to be a bit more international collaboration. But I can tell you some good news from, I guess, larger satellite operators. So something that’s happening, that’s the new phenomenon is what we call mega constellations. So these are constellations of 100, or more satellites, sometimes thousands of satellites, and they’re generally either doing Earth observation, or they’re doing internet from space. So these are people like SpaceX, Amazon, Boeing, Samsung, who are… there are many others as well… Airbus. And all of these people want to put up thousands of satellites each, sometimes. So what we found is that there’s a bit of shaming going on in that space. So Airbus in particular has been extremely vocal about SpaceX’s first satellites that they’ve put up as part of their constellation. And just last week, there was a near miss between a European Space Agency satellite and one of the SpaceX satellites, and Airbus has just had a field day, paying them out since then.
Mel De Gioia 26:22
So from an engineering perspective, I’m going to preface this by saying that one of the engineers who we’ve spoken to recently, so Phil Wilkinson, it was brought to his attention that refrigerants are the number one cause of climate change. And so what he’s actually said in these podcast is along the lines of engineer’s advanced society, but at the expense of expense of the environment. So in a way, the space industry is advancing society, but you’re causing problems. So is there a role for the engineer to be considerate of that side of things?
Guest 27:00
Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Hundred percent. Yeah. I think more engineers should be cognizant of the different controls. So I mean, in mechanical engineering, we all know that the the controls of engineering, so the first is removing the problem is always a good first start. So in this case, it would be – Do you need all the satellites, maybe remove excess satellites from your constellation. And then there are other controls, and you know, engineering is like fourth down the list or something along those lines. So there’s all these controls you can implement and I think engineers should be really cognizant of that. And aerospace engineers, in particular should learn from other industries on how they control risk in this way, because no one wins right
Mel De Gioia 27:43
yeah, you’re going to create bigger problems for the future that you have to find a solution for. As it is, it’s already a problem.
Dom 27:51
Yeah, I think we think with engineers that we really need to, as you said, we need to look to other industries as well, because it always seems as though the best ideas come from out of left field, when you’re not, you’re not looking to solve that problem, you usually finds the solution to a problem you didn’t even know you had most of the time. So whilst you’re very much entrenched in the future of engineering, what, what do you think is the future of engineering?
Guest 28:18
Oh, well, I’m glad, I’m glad you’ve asked that question, because I think that’s really cool. And one thing that I think about often when working in space is how just stupidly gigantic space is, like it’s, you can’t even think about it, it’s that big. And so as an aerospace engineer, and I think a lot of astronomers are the same, you get these really tiny numbers, and then these really bloody huge numbers, as well. And so you see these things obstructed as numbers. But you look out at the night sky, and you like, you just can’t even believe how far away everything is. So, the point of that is that space is so big, and the earth is so small, and you know, we design most of engineering is so focused on the earth. And I think there’s this huge expansion that will happen into the future that will help us here on Earth help us maintain a pleasant and environmentally friendly environment. And I think a lot of engineers will start having to think about different and extreme environments, especially in space, but also around the earth as well, and thinking about doing things differently, friendly to the environment that you’re in.
Dom 29:32
Okay, and what would you say to people just starting out,
Guest 29:36
just starting out as engineers? I mean, I think, going back to the start of the podcast, I think it’s all about motivation, right? So motivate yourself and, and keep that in your mind and remember often why you got motivated to become an engineer in the first place. Because I see a lot of engineers that aren’t doing what they love. And I was that engineer for 2 years as well. And I think it really shows in your work. So you need to keep your inspiration and your motivation close.
Dom 30:09
Yeah, I agree completely. I think if you… if you’re not doing something that is your passion. It’s just yeah, it’s very hard to get out of bed in the morning to be honest, it wouldn’t matter what you were doing, whether you’re doing engineering or anything else, you’ve got to find that thing. It’s like as you said, you kind of went from grades that were sort of average to grades that were over and above because there’s obviously wasn’t… you loved doing what you were doing. So it makes it very easy to do it
Guest 30:35
Exactly.
Dom 30:36
It’s unfortunate I think there’s a lot of people out there in, in industry who aren’t doing what they love, and you can really tell . Yeah, you can really tell when people love what they’re doing. It makes such a massive difference.
Mel De Gioia 30:50
And to start wrapping up, just what’s the piece of engineering that impresses you?
Guest 31:01
I think, I think a computer science in engineering always impresses me like the things those guys do. I just, you know, can’t quite figure out how it works most of the time. And so I just find it. That’s like magic to me, even though I’m an engineer. Well, you know, you know, you kind.. you know, what, the different processes are, but still, it just fascinates me, it just seems so complex. And I know it’s built of smaller parts that operate together, but it’s still wows me every time. So yeah.
Dom 31:36
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean with that one.
Guest 31:40
Good. Yeah, thanks for backing me up.
Dom 31:41
Yeah, yeah. Does my head in too. I sort of look at it and go.. how does it… And just to wrap up, do you have an engineer that you admire?
Guest 31:52
Oh, yeah. Well, actually… Wernher von Braun, who was a German scientists who developed rockets during the Nazi era, which is quite infamous of him. But he did it under immense pressure. And one of his most famous quotes is I hope this is actually his. It’s very hard with famous people to attribute quotes, but but his his most famous quote was, we launched a rocket and that was successful – I’m paraphrasing here sorry – It’s so unfortunate that it landed on the wrong planet. Meaning that it was a bomb that he launched, but he wished that it was a rocket to go to Mars or something along those lines.
Dom 32:36
It is amazing with engineering and how often particularly with defence programmes and things like that, things that are created that… it’s sad what they used for, but it’s also some of the things that come out of it thag are so amazing that we probably wouldn’t be where we where we are today, or wouldn’t develop into the future if we didn’t have those sort of bad misses I suppose.
Mel De Gioia 33:01
Well thank you so much
Dom 33:01
Yeah, thanks for that. That was awesome.
Guest 33:01
Thanks for having me.
Mel De Gioia 33:06
And thank you for tuning in to another episode of Engineering Heroes. If you want to know more about our podcast, your best port of call will always be our website, visit www.engineeringheroes.com.au and take some time to check out what we have going on. I’ve just launched a free Facebook group called We Are Engineering Heroes. It’s a place for fans and engineers to get together and chat. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen, if you really enjoyed today’s show. The best way to show your support is to go and tell someone, seriously it’s that easy. Go tell people you know all about our podcast and how they can listen. We look forward to you and your friends joining us next week when we bring you another interview with one of our engineering champions.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
We interview engineers as they discuss their life and the issues they are dealing with.
Share this entry