认识电力(4)

The moving wire in the Earth's magnetic field generated thirty-five hundred volts, enough energy to power a space station. Okay, we see the tension go way down but the tether's still going out fine, very slight lateral oscillation.

The tether was clearly visible from the ground. It was one of the biggest manmade objects ever sent into space.

For five hours the tether swept through our planet's magnetic field generating more and more electricity. How did they do? The tether has broken, and it is going away from us.

Get on the, get it on the TV, please . . . get it on the TV. The tether is broken. Copy. Trying to photograph it floating away from us.

Looking back, we quickly saw that, in fact, the tether had broken. This was a very, you know, it's a big shock.

It's a, it's kind of an empty feeling in, in the pit of your stomach when you look and you realize that there, there is the tether moving away from us at about eighty feet per second, and you just wanted to reach out and grab it. The wire was generating so much electricity that a spark jumped from the wire to the satellite deployment system and burned through the tether.

The four hundred forty million dollar experimental satellite just drifted away. Yes, sir, well, those are some tether dynamics we did not want to see.

Well, look, we, we have demonstrated that you can generate a lot of electricity with tether and, unfortunately, we've also demonstrated that you can use tethers to launch a satellite into a much higher orbit. NASA will try the experiment again because it could lead to a new, more reliable power system for space stations and help avoid situations like the mirror mishap.

We're moving, moving to actually is if we drive current in the opposite direction in the tether and if we could force the current to go the other way it becomes a propulsive device, so a propellantless spacecraft. And, the next generation of space travelers may be using electric propulsion devices as opposed to chemical propulsion devices, a little Star Trek, if you will.