This is the biggest, most ambitious, most expensive video I've ever made. And it's also gonna be terrifying. We are strapping these giant metal weights to the belly of that helicopter, flying it up several kilometers in the sky and then dropping these weights, on a sandcastle city. I mean, we need luck. (dramatic music) Here we go. - Oh my. YEAH! And this is all for a very good reason. So let's do it. Come on. In the late 1950s, the
United States had a problem. The Soviet Union launched the
first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into orbit around the earth on the 4th of October, 1957, but less well known is that
just over a month earlier, they successfully tested the first intercontinental
ballistic missile or ICBM. It could deliver a nuclear
warhead from the Soviet Union to cities on the US East
Coast, in around 30 minutes. Facing this threat, a researcher at Boeing named Jerry Pournelle came up with an idea for a space weapon. It could hit any location on Earth in half that time, just 15 minutes. It could destroy targets
buried 30 meters underground like the silos where the
Soviet nukes were kept. And theoretically it could
intercept ICBM's mid-flight. His concept was to put
telephone pole sized pieces of tungsten in space, in orbit. So that these pieces of tungsten could drop on a target
basically at any time. The idea was within a 15 minute window you would be able to release
one of these tungsten rods and have it re-enter the atmosphere and strike a target in minutes. And it would come in so fast, you know, in orbit things go about
eight kilometers per second, and as it enters the
atmosphere, it's gonna slow down due to the atmospheric drag, but still on impact it's
still gonna be going like 10 times the speed of sound. Mach 10 or about three
kilometers per second. This is MOAB, which stands for
massive ordinance air blast but it's more commonly
referred to by its nickname the Mother of All Bombs. It is one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosives on the planet. When it detonated, it
released the equivalent of 11 tons of TNT. Now, just one of these
tungsten rods coming in would have the same energy as the largest conventional
explosive ever detonated. They are not bombs, they
contain no explosives but the amount of energy
that they're carrying in their kinetic energy
because they are so heavy and they're going so fast it is as big as any conventional
bomb ever detonated. Pournelle called his weapon Project Thor after the Norse God who threw lightning bolts from the heavens. In the 1980s the kinetic
missile interceptor idea was seriously considered by
the Reagan administration. It was codenamed, Brilliant Pebbles but the project was abandoned. In 2003 it was resurrected by the Air Force Transformation Plan which referred to this weapon
as hypervelocity rod bundles. But colloquially, the weapon
is known as Rods from God. The kinetic energy of an
object is directly proportional to its mass and its velocity squared. So increasing the objects mass 10 times, increases its kinetic energy 10 times. But if you increase the
velocity by a factor of 10 the kinetic energy grows
by a factor of a hundred. This is why even very light objects can carry lots of kinetic energy. This is what a 15 gram piece of plastic does to a block of aluminum when traveling at six
kilometers per second. And this is a real problem for satellites because of the massive speeds on orbit, micro meteorites, small
bolts, or even flecks of paint are serious risks for the astronauts living onboard the
International Space Station. This chip in the window of the ISS was caused by a tiny speck of dust. And a small piece of space junk punctured a hole in the robotic arm. Imagine something that weighs
10 tons traveling that fast. Kinetic energy weapons appear in fiction including dozens of movies,
video games and books. But how realistic are they? I mean, could this weapon
ever become a reality? Well, that's why we're here
in the middle of the desert. We wanna see how damaging
a Rod from God could be. And we really pulled out all the stops, even hiring a team of
professional sandcastle builders to construct a city onto
which we'll drop the rods. I have all the respect in the world, for these sandcastle builders. - We are seven time US
Open Sand Castle Champions. - That's so cool. It'll endure the test
of the highest weight at the highest drop
with very little damage. I'm really convinced of that. - The US Capital was great. - Yeah, isn't that great?
- Yeah. - It's one of our favorite. - I love all the buildings there. Who did the pickle? The Gherkin? - Yeah, the Gherkin right here. - Very nice. This is beautiful. I mean, I feel bad for trying to hit it. I am just very concerned about aiming, the city is not that big. So before we get to that drop we're gonna try to hit this swimming pool with a 100 kilogram or a 220 pound mass. Probably go up about 500 meters. Try to drop a weight right into this pool. I don't think it's gonna work. I don't think we're gonna hit it. In fact, my main concern for the whole day is that we're just not gonna
be able to hit anything. And then what was the point in coming out here in the first place? These are gonna be the
questions that I ask myself. So the way we're targeting is with GPS, we're gonna take a GPS mark from like the center of the pool. Oh boy. We've also got GPS in the helicopter. We're gonna use that to
try to line up square over the middle of the pool. So if we're able to hit
this pool from 500 meters then I think we've got a shot. (dramatic music) - Where's your GPS? - My GPS is my phone. And I have the coordinates
written on my arm. We're ready to go. We're professionals - First drop and it's feeling
shaky I gotta tell you. I'm surprised it can
pull a load that heavy! - We've got another
700 feet to be at 1500. - Okay. - I just dunno like why
they're circling up that high. Is that 500 meters? That seems really high. - Ryan to Rick, what's your altitude? - 500 meters. - We're 1500 feet, that
seems higher than 1500 feet. - They're at 500 meters right now. - That is freaking crazy, okay. - Here we go. This is the one. - This is the one. - It's swinging around
like crazy up there! - Yeah. Does it have fins on it? - Jesus. No. No fins. Why didn't we have this
conversation a week ago? - Looking good? - We're good left to right. That's good. We just need to go forward. - Oh geez. That does not look like
they're in position, right? Are you kidding me? - It never will. - Its dropped. - Oh my. What the? What is that gonna hit? Oh, it is going sideways. What did it hit? - Way past the sandcastle. - Oh geez. That was way more off than I thought. - Oh my God. - I was right on. Was yours showing the
same thing back there? - Yeah, we were right on it. - Yeah. Good. Well that's kinda weird. That's just gonna show you
what's gonna happen at altitude. We both said we were right
on it and we weren't. - It didn't look like you
guys were moving, but... - Yeah he's telling me our
horizontal velocity was zero. - And you were in the right spot? - We were exactly in the right spot. - Oh wow. Oh wow! Look at that. - Oh Wow. - Totally, totally buried. Falling from 500 meters, the rod accelerated for 10 seconds. And even accounting for air resistance it hit the ground going about
350 kilometers per hour. At that speed, with a mass
of a hundred kilograms it was carrying nearly half a million joules of kinetic energy. Our plan for the day is to drop something twice as heavy from six times higher. Then it's energy on impact will be greater than the explosion of a kilogram of TNT. Kinetic impacts are explosive. If you look at the craters on the moon and you look really closely you're gonna see that they're
basically all circles. I think no one stops to
ask why are they circular? If you imagine when the
moon gets hit by asteroids they're gonna come in from
all different directions. So shouldn't you get these
sort of oblong shapes where the asteroid comes in? Well, the truth is, the asteroids come in with such incredible speed that it's not like they're
pushing dirt out of the way and that's what creates the crater. No, they're coming in so fast that when they collide their
kinetic energy is explosive. It heats up the ground, turns
things into liquid and gas. They all get super hot and they spray outwards
in a giant explosion. And this explosion is symmetric. It doesn't matter which angle or how shallow the asteroid was coming in, it's gonna blow out everything radially because it is explosive. Kinetic energy is explosive. And I think for me, that's just
the really surprising thing. It would be the exact same thing with dropping these rods going Mach 10, when they hit a target
they're gonna create an explosion as though
they are the largest conventional weapon ever launched. And because it's going so fast, it can penetrate around 30 meters of soil, enough to bust bunkers or silos. And the explosion is
therefore more localized. So it can be used for
precise surgical strikes. Plus, unlike a nuclear weapon there's no radioactive
fallout to worry about or international laws. Do these ideas contravene
any current laws or treaties? - No. The only international
agreement there is about putting weapons in space
is about nuclear weapons. The only real prohibition is about putting nuclear weapons in space. - Man, like I thought
targets would be hard to hit. Now I'm like super convinced
they're impossible to hit. - What we're gonna do now, we're gonna do a much lower altitude and we're gonna do it visually. - Yeah. Great. - So we're gonna do it, you
know, 300 feet visually. - I love it. We're gonna do a cube drop. Cube drop, is interesting cause I was like we
shouldn't do a cube drop. We're here talking about Rods from God. They're cylinders right? Now I'm so thankful we have the cubes because the cylinders,
as Adam Savage told me, - Cylinders tend to fall on their sides, given enough chance. - Really? Who would've thought I
would've thought like, you know, a pencil type thing, it would tend to aim straight down. That still looks high. Is that a hundred meters? Does that? 30 second call, it doesn't look like
they're over the pool. It's totally blowing around in the wind. It's totally swinging. - GPS is spot on and I see it right below. - Still feels high. - We're on it. We're on it. - Here we go. - All right. That wasn't far off. - We're off by 60 feet. - Yeah. Oh wow. Did it look like we were right above it? - Looked like it yeah. - Wow. 'Cause I still was right on it as well. - That's something, from a hundred meters. I'll take it. Okay, we're setting up to drop this mass. 200 kilograms, 440 pounds. What do you think? - Yeah, we're gonna get there. - Are we gonna hit it this time? - I hope so. This is the moment of truth. We've had two misses so far. So we're going 50 meters
or 150 feet above the pool which for me it's pretty disappointing. But at this point I just
want to hit something. - 30 seconds! 30 seconds! - Oh boy. The weight is swinging around on there. It's getting blown around by the wind. I mean we need luck. There it goes, there
it goes, there it goes. I'm tracking, tracking. Got a hit of the pool! - (screaming) Yes! (crew all cheer) - It hit something. - Yes! - It was like right on the edge. Right on the edge. - WOO! - This morning I was so worried that we weren't going to hit anything. And like I think the footage is so shaky cause I was so excited. But like seeing that
from above was amazing. - Wow. It ripped right through the pool. - That's crazy. - Unbelievable. - Oh, look at the rubber duckies. - So, is the next target, the sandcastle? And you wanna go for a hundred meters? - I wanna double it. - This will be amazing if we can actually hit the
sandcastle from a hundred meters. That'll be something In all the different
incarnations of Rods from God. The rods are made out of tungsten. And there are two reasons for this. The first is that tungsten
is really, really dense. A cubic meter of tungsten weighs 19 tons. That's over twice the density of steel which is what we're using here just because it's a lot cheaper. But that means for a given amount of mass tungsten rods could be less
than half the volume of steel and therefore encounter less resistance as they pass through the atmosphere. And importantly for re-entry, tungsten also has an
incredibly high melting point. The highest of any metal, at almost three and a half
thousand degrees celsius. This is important because
as the rod decelerates through the atmosphere a lot of heat builds up all around it. And tungsten's high melting point means the rods require much less shielding to prevent them from melting. The shape is also important. The goal is to hit the target with as much speed as possible. So a sleek, aerodynamic shape is best and rods are a great shape for that. Aerodynamics is why arrows and bullets and ballistic missiles
all look the way they do. It's to minimize drag. Honestly one of the big mistakes we made was not welding fins onto our rods. We're going up to about a
hundred meters or 300 feet, before we drop. We're gonna hit the sandcastle city. That's the goal. - Any minute, any second. - There it goes, there
it goes, there it goes. It's going. Did it hit in front? - Just in font. - Hit just in front. - We just missed it. - We were close. We were really close. So the tractor's gonna dig
the weight out right now. - Yeah.
- Just pick it up. - That's how it landed. - So close to taking out the capital. - Yeah. Look at that. - 30 seconds to drop. - Ah, that wind. - 20 seconds. - 20 seconds. That wind is brutal. Oh boy. Oh boy. Oh boy. Hit something on the left? But I don't think it was the city. Seeing all the challenges
we're going through reminds me just how difficult it is to
aim a kinetic projectile. 10 seconds. - Three, two, one , and drop. - There it goes. Did they hit a building? Capitol's still here. What? What?
- What? - I cannot believe it. Direct hit on the building, but it only took down that side. - I find it unbelievable, that it hit right there
- Look at the cracks. - Look at the cracks in the back - and like it created cracks but it didn't make the whole - didn't destroy the whole building. This is not what you would use if you wanted to cause mass devastation. This is like if you wanted
to pinpoint a target. Now if I'm honest, we did not manage to make a
fair test of Rods from God, even on a small scale. You know I wanted to drop 200 kilograms from three kilometers. But aiming was so hard that
we got nowhere near that. So we didn't get to
see the explosive power of kinetic energy. When we made one last ditch attempt to drop again from 500 meters. I was just terrified
that we were gonna hit something or someone. Look out, look out, look out, look out, look out. Oh! Oh! Caw! I was just happy to finish
the day with everyone safe. I didn't shoot that
cause I was so terrified. Oh, I see it. Wow. You're right that it bounced out. But given the amount of time and money we spent on this video I would say it is my
biggest failure of all time which as it turns out, is also something you could say about the actual weapon Rods from God. I mean, just start with aiming. Steering a Rod from God
is in theory possible you could use thrusters or adjustable fins or change the rod's center of mass. But in practice it's incredibly
difficult to aim an object traveling at hypersonic speeds. Not only that, communicating with the rod from the ground or from space would be nearly impossible due to the superheated
plasma surrounding it. And there are other problems. You know, say you want to hit
a target within 15 minutes you'd think the simplest
thing would be to put a rod right above the target
in geostationary orbit. But geostationary orbit is
over 35,000 kilometers away. That's almost a 10th the
distance to the moon. So from there a rod
would take several hours to fall to the earth. And if you put it in low earth orbit say around 350 kilometers above the earth the rod will move relative to the ground doing a revolution around
the earth every 90 minutes. So between ordering a strike
and the rod hitting the target that could take anywhere
up to an hour and a half. Now you might think that
you could get that time down to about 30 minutes by placing say 10
satellites in that orbit. But remember, the earth
rotates so orbits drift, you would actually need
hundreds of satellites to make sure there's always
a rod close by the target. So let's say you want to put
a hundred rods into space. Well, the cost of launching them
will be billions of dollars. And over time the thrusters
will break down and malfunction. So there are going to be
ongoing maintenance costs. But what if you just want to
use it for missile defense? Well then you don't need
something that weighs 10 tons, a smaller rod would do. But even then it's really, really tricky. And to successfully intercept an ICBM, you've gotta hit it
during the boost phase, modern ICBMs split into a number
of payloads after the boost some of which are decoys to overwhelm anti ICBM defense missiles. To stop North Korean ICBM
launches for example, the US would need around 400 rods spread among eight orbits to be able to intercept missiles in time. A global defense system would require at least
a few times that amount. And it's been calculated that
even a very limited system would cost around 300 billion dollars, which is nearly half of the
US military annual budget. And even that wouldn't work because enemies could evade the defense by launching several
missiles at the same time. Since there's only one rod in the right location at any time, a rod could intercept one of the missiles but the rest would pass through. So Rods from God turns out to be unfeasible to execute in reality. After his stint at Boeing, Jerry Pournelle who came up with the idea,
became a science fiction writer. And in his 1985 New York Times
bestselling book, Footfall an alien race uses kinetic
weapons to invade the earth. And honestly, I'm pretty
glad that this weapon is feasible only in science fiction. Engineering is all about trying, failing and sometimes blowing stuff up. And if you can't drop giant
steel rods in the desert well then the next best
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This is the worst video I've seen from him in quite a while
What's the deal with these science-bro-youtubers trying to drop stuff from the sky? Didn't Mark Rober try the same stunt and it also didn't work?
IMO these guys should have watched more How Ridiculous; it's very clear that dropping stuff from the sky is not accurate.
No laser guide, no fins, no wire guides (although probably dangerous for heli flight), the straps were too long and swayed to much, that hyped up kid with gps coordinates on his forearm?!, Adam Savage in light distain, no high altitude drop... The most cringe is the overly expressive youtuber-esque hype whenever there was a major event, cheering yelling or whining. There were good segments and it was informative in many ways, but the live action was underwhelming and puzzling to say the least. As if I was watching a great comedy writer do a terrible stand-up set.
This video was such a mess. How do you not do a scale model test in a shop or in your back yard before commissioning national championship sand castle builders (??) and a freaking helicopter.
Unbelievably poor planning from Derek and his team
What a complete waste of my time to watch this. No effort was spend before on increasing the chances of this working. No fins, no laser aiming, no dropping the weight without a tether, no precise positioning with a accurate enough GPS device.
I feel like they rushed this video because they had already booked the heli for the penny video. They knew this was not going to work so they pretended to be surprised by it not working. Their reactions look like bad reality tv, fake.
It would have been smarter to either not release this video or repeat this with better preparation and then do a video on both tries to show what they improved.
I understand that Veritasium's videos have, as of late, been very high quality, and that probably makes this one seem even worse by comparison. That doesn't excuse this atrocity. It's clear that Derek spent a lot of money on this, and I get that he wanted to salvage something out of it. This was probably filmed at the same time as the penny drop episode. He could have spent some time making the projectile aerodynamic, and he didn't have to focus on one single target. The sand city was just a bad idea in general: it neither reflects accurately on actual damage nor gives a reliable sense of scale. The diagram with the orbits was also not that good. If a Rods of God launcher wants to hit North Korea, it wouldn't be directly above the target, but rather approaching it in its orbital trajectory. This is because the dropped projectile maintains the same horizontal velocity as the launcher.
Also, the fact that Adam Savage was in this but barely even got mentioned is just disrespectful.
Can someone please inform Derek about Guide wires"?
I get that it's important to own up to your failed experiments in science, but this is 25 minutes times 480 000 views as of now, that's 22.8yr of human life spent because of a poorly thought through science experiment that demonstrated nothing really.
I truly hope he takes this video down soon. Huge hit to his reputation
Clickbait is one thing but this title is just a lie. They dropped rods from a helicopter, didn't test any military weapon.