On February 25, three days after Space Shuttle Columbia launched on the STS-75 mission, astronauts began deploying a satellite attached to the orbiter by an extraordinarily long conducting tether. The experiment, carried out roughly 160 nautical miles above Earth, looked almost like an absurdly ambitious physics demonstration: Columbia would unreel miles of cable into space and let the system move through Earth's magnetic field. In their joint investigation, NASA and the Italian Space Agency established that the tether burned up and broke after the extension of 19.7 kilometers (approximately 12.2 miles) of cable had spooled out from the cargo bay of Columbia.
A kite string made of physics
