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Shuttle's 12-mile satellite tether snaps

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A 12-mile tether connecting a half-ton satellite to Columbia broke yesterday and drifted safely away from the space shuttle and its seven astronauts.

Astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman shouted down the news nearly five hours into the electricity-generating experiment, as the cable was almost all the way out.

"The tether has broken at the boom! The tether has broken! It is going away from us!" Hoffman told Mission Control.

The satellite and dangling cord quickly drifted away from Columbia as all three objects sped around Earth at 17,500 mph.

Within several minutes, the satellite and tether were more than 18 miles away from Columbia, a safe distance.

Mission Control commentator James Hartsfield said the electricity-conducting cable apparently broke somewhere inside a 40-foot tower in the shuttle cargo bay. Only 33 feet of the 12.8-mile tether remained in the tower and was steady.

Engineering Prof. Tamas Gombosi said the problem was not complely unexpected.

"With brand-new things like this that have never been tried before, you can't be sure of what will happen," Gombosi said in a telephone interview with The Michigan Daily last night.

The astronauts were aware of the problem almost instantly because of a sudden decrease in tension in the 1/10-inch thick tether.