PROJECT THOR: Deadly Metal From Outer Space

this episode of because science is sponsored by borderlands 3 Kyle you're a secret supervillain we all know it yeah it's me I need an orbital strike Kinect project Thor get it done sorry yes sir project Thor is one of the most infamous almost developed space weapons of all time you may have heard the name and you may have even seen the concept in movies but what is project Thor how would it work and what kind of destruction could it cause let's get technical [Music] a few years after the start of the Cold War both the United States and the Soviet Union were ramping into mutually assured destruction developing among other world Enders ICBMs or intercontinental ballistic missiles these were extremely long range weapons that could take nuclear warheads thousands of kilometers away in 1955 the United States had a different idea to keep up with Soviet production they wanted rapidly constructed rockets that could hit closer targets the first of these intermediate range ballistic missiles was codenamed Thor by the end of the Cold War thankfully none of these IRB mjolnir's ever had to be used that is until a man named dr. Jerry Pournelle took this Thor idea to space working at Boeing at the time and piggybacking off of the Thor missile technology in 1964 dr. Jerry Parnell first described an orbital weapons system that could be away towards unlimited space power he published his idea in 1975 and referred to it as project Thor the idea of project Thor was relatively simple instead of maintaining complicated weapon systems on the ground you can instead just put a bunch of big metal pulls in orbit like ICBMs these orbital telephone poles as dr. Cornell described them could be set up to strike targets on earth however because these poles are in orbit and they have a crazy orbital velocity multiple rods set up in orbit around the earth could guarantee that an ominous cylinder of doom could be over any target on the planet in as little as 15 minutes once one of these tubes of doom was over a target on earth a signal from the ground would be given to start the deorbiting process already in low-earth orbit a pole or a satellite system containing multiple poles would either break or expend some fuel to change trajectories just minutes after this deorbiting process a sinister cylinder from outer space would strike a target on the ground with incredible velocity dr. portnow didn't know who first came up with the phrase but the theoretical ability for project Thor to summon giant destructive hunks of metal anywhere on earth at will like Mjolnir here is probably why this idea came to be known as rods from God after his time at Boeing dr. poore knell went on to become a successful science fiction writer and popularized this idea in his books today though I think this concept has penetrated pop culture enough in video games and books and movies and TV shows that there's actually some confusion about the original concept so being good supervillain space-weapons enthusiasts it's time to set the record straight still worthy so let's outline exactly what these metal Thunderbolts could realistically do why because knowing is half the battle because science one of the appeals of a weapon system like this is that it uses very simple projectiles this bad boy is solid metal no warheads or explosives inside just some fins for stabilization and an internal guidance system which can read GPS and signals from the ground this is a dirt-cheap design at least compared to modern missiles which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a piece and these are mass-producible the most cited dimensions for one of these projectiles comes from a 2003 report by the US Air Force according to that report an effective orbital lawn dart might have a 1 foot diameter and be around 20 feet long you can see why these were referred to as orbital telephone poles with the given dimensions we're talking about a hundred and fifteen gallons of pointy space metal moving at orbital velocity and because of that velocity dr. poore nel suggested making these telephone poles out of tungsten tungsten or wolfram is an incredibly robust element and it has two properties that are important for orbital bombardment purposes the first is that tungsten has the highest known melting point of any element and the second is that this is very very dense around twice as dead has led if this orbital telephone pole was made out of something less robust it might burn up in the atmosphere or not have enough mass to do some real damage and we don't want just a shooting star that does nothing we want a tungsten Thunderbolt yeah sorry but why orbital lawn darts couldn't project Thor use something even simpler like a tungsten sphere like giant destructive gumballs from God the reason is drag any weapon system that has to travel from space down to the surface of our planet necessarily has to travel through the atmosphere because these orbital telephone poles don't have any warheads or explosives we would want to minimize drag in the force of air on them to maintain speed as much as possible in the force of drag equation we cannot change the density of the air but we can change the cross-sectional area that that air might push on this cylinder and this sphere have roughly the same diameter and therefore the same cross-sectional area available to the force of drag but look at just how much more mass you can fit behind this cross-sectional area if you're using a cylinder as your shape more mass less drag more dangerous the destructive power of project Thor has everything to do with mass and velocity out here projects or has a number of theoretical advantages the first is raw ferocious speed every destructive weapon has to get its destructive energy from somewhere a conventional bomb gets it from the chemical energy stored within the bonds of its material and floors tungsten telephone poles would get its energy from kinetic energy now show them the equation [Music] all right I don't even get reception up here the energy of motion that will go into any project Thor impact will be a result of the projectiles large mass in this case 80 300 kilograms almost 20,000 pounds based on the density of tungsten and the projectiles velocity obviously velocity will be the large driver here because it is squared in our kinetic energy equation now I think when we imagine objects orbiting the earth like these orbital telephone poles they always seem to be moving slowly in our heads and that's true they do but only when you're looking at it at this scale if you zoom in a bit you realize that orbital velocity is blisteringly quick for example moving at 7.8 kilometers per second a rod from God could complete the 100-meter dash before a nerve impulse from your brain could tell your mouth to say wow this velocity is why project Thor can be simple and doesn't need warheads it's been reported over the years across the internet in articles and in videos that a rod from God has another potential advantage besides simplicity upon impact it might have the energy of a nuclear bomb however we mentioned drag before and that's because any project Thor projectile will have to pass through the atmosphere before hitting the ground and this means that it will necessarily slow way down that US Air Force report estimated a reduction in velocity from around 8 kilometers per second to around 3 or Mach 10 do the math with our previously stated numbers and you find that a single project for projectile might impart 50 billion Jools worth of kinetic energy to a target this is obviously a lot but it's still a thousand times less energy than even our first nuclear weapons so project Thor isn't on the same level that doesn't mean that a rod from God wouldn't be terrifyingly destructive here are some footage of a test of an explosive called the mother of all bombs an explosion with roughly equivalent energy the thought of an orbiting hunk of metal dropping out of nowhere anywhere in the world within minutes and making that happen is definitely sobering and scary and it's probably why we still talk about project Thor today but why do we just talked about project Thor why in 70 years has animal eteri implemented a system like this dr. Cornell consider project Thor to be a sort of Magic Bullet against hard targets that needed to be taken out quickly for example he estimated that a single projectile could rip any ship currently afloat in a half it could destroy any bridge and demolish basically any building because of the projectile size and their extreme velocity these are very very hard to detect deflect or destroy it all sounds like the perfect weapons system but dr. Cornell himself said that project Thor even in limited use makes no sense project Thor is obviously an interesting concept or else we wouldn't still be talking about it today but it's wildly impractical because of cost the cost of getting just a single rod that is eight metric tons into space let alone a whole system of rods and satellites is prohibitively expensive according to dr. Cornell this system was ready to be designed and implemented in the 80s but because the cost of getting a single kilogram into space didn't go way down like commercial airline flight costs this metal Thunderbolt concept just never got off the ground I think and so project Thor never got off the ground in reality but it did certainly take off in science fiction after dr. porn L became a sci-fi author he refined his ID with legendary author Larry Niven and their ideas spread to nearly all forms of sci-fi media from movies like GI Joe to video games like Call of Duty to shows like Babylon 5 we can't be totally sure that a concept similar to project Thor isn't currently being developed I mean that report from the US Air Force was in 2003 and there was a very similar patent filed by China in 2016 but for now this classic science fiction concept has to remain just that fiction because of oh sorry yeah because science no you don't get to say it I get to say it yeah just just order this strike [Laughter] [Music] we kind of quickly glossed over the point that a cylinder shape for a projectile can have a lot more mass than a sphere with the same diameter and I want to return to that just for a second because it affects all modern weaponry it's not just project Thor so we used to have like musket balls that would shoot and now we have more elongated bullets and one of the reasons why we've done this is because again you can fit a lot more mass in this more cylindrical shape than you could in a sphere of the same diameter so all the bullets are like tiny little Thor's thanks again to Borderlands 3 for sponsoring today's episode the original shooter looter is back and bigger than ever with four all-new vault hunters and over 1 billion guns it's time to lock load and loot pick up your copy on Xbox one ps4 or PC now let's make some mayhem rated M for Mature oh you're you're still here I'll let me why don't thank you so much for watching Steven if you like this video you'll probably like some of our other space sciency videos where we do a lot of weird stuff to our planets and stuff but if you want to follow me and because science on social media to suggest ideas for future episodes or just to you know do that sick liking and retweeting you can do that here Thanks yeah now you can end the episode now it's fine

Channel: Because Science

Views: 763,581

Rating: 4.9452782 out of 5

Keywords: Nerdist, Because Science, Kyle Hill, Project Thor, Kinetic bombardment, Orbital bombardment

Id: I4Q2zlOdmr4

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 19 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Tiny_Pay]

"Oh u're still here." DAMN RIGHT!