The Goofiest Space Experiment In History

did you know that this is the biggest object humans have ever sent into space it may not look like it but this is actually a 20 km long piece of wire that's as tall as the Empire State Building well 45 of them but what's he doing there it must be the universe's longest string telephone hello hello prepare for Invasion Earth well that's not good to actually understand what it's for we need to look at farad's law of induction if I move this Loop of wire through this magnetic field a small current is produced you can

increase the power generated by using more wire and moving it faster in fact stick a propeller on the end and now you have yourself a wind turbine this concept made the big brains at Nasa go you know how like the Earth is like basically a giant magnet yeah bro totally what if we use like a super long wire bro huh so $400 million later this is the plan they came up with Earth has big magnetic field so we send spaceship with big wire but Earth magnetic field very weak so we send even bigger wire then

we move spaceship super fast to generate power then we rule the galaxy the system was called the tss1 or teed satellite system one it had a base satellite a subsatellite and a 20 km long conductive tether connecting them both acting as the wire now you may have noticed something wrong here in our original example we used a loop of wire because electricity needs a closed loop to flow and this tether is not a loop but electricity is really just the flow of electrons and turns out there's a layer of the Earth's atmosphere called the ionosphere

which has a bunch of free electrons just floating around so using a fancy electron collector and emitter NASA designed a syst to create electron flow using the ionosphere completing the loop in 1992 tss1 was launched aboard space shuttle Atlantis it successfully reached the ionosphere and it was finally time to unfur the 20 km long te um Houston we have a problem this screw isn't going to cut it okay swap him out then hey we we should test everything again to make sure it works right nah should be [Music] good it was not good that beefy

screw caused the tether real to jam up but a whopping 260 M pretty much 1% of its maximum length moral of the story always test and retest after making any design changes quite the expensive lesson to learn but surely they'll get it next time right right woo we made a plus 216 M this time and the tether successfully deployed to its full length of 20 k um Houston we we have a problem it was so close but when the tether reached 19.7 km a small defect in the insulation near the bottom led to a large

Ark that melted it and that's how we ended up here a giant Space Noodle floating in the sky it was sighted all Mo of the world like in Australia in Hawaii in southern USA and a few weeks later it re-entered the atmosphere cooking the Space Noodle once and for all but the big question is did the experiment work though well NASA managed to collect some data and the tether generated almost 3.5 KW of electrical power enough to run three toasters at once okay that doesn't seem like much but for context most small satellites only need

one toaster amount of power but despite this the teed satellite system missions were abandoned and the results weren't publicized well apart from being roasted by the media I guess it is kind of embarrassing to have your mistake plasted in the sky for the whole world to see but I really hope they try again because I imagine the night sky in the future where space noodles hang from every spaceship and satellite # bringback space noodles please I haven't seen the Sun and years see you next time