An engineer came up with a plan to drop tungsten telephone poles from space - the idea has been seriously considered on multiple occasions, so we tested it. Head to https://brilliant.org/Veritasium to start your free trial. The first 200 will get 20% off Brilliant's annual premium subscription.

Massive thanks to Archisand for building such a beautiful sandcastle. https://www.youtube.com/@GregLeBon

Huge thanks to John and Angie Miller for helping us with securing the shooting location and going above and beyond to make this shoot happen – http://highdesertlocations.com/

Thanks to Inland Empire Film Services and the San Bernardino County Film Office for portions of the video shot in the County of San Bernardino.

Massive thanks to Dr David Wright for the interview and providing invaluable guidance during the research for this video.

Here’s a great video about space-based missile defense – https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/space-based-missile-defense-not-good-idea

Massive thanks to Adam Savage for being part of this video.

Additional photos from NASA and ESA.

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References:
USAF. (2003). The US Air Force transformation flight plan.

Preston, R., Johnson, D. J., Edwards, S. J., Miller, M. D., & Shipbaugh, C. (2002). Space weapons earth wars. Rand Corporation.

Wright, D., Grego, L., & Gronlund, L. (2005). The physics of space security. A Reference Manual, Cambridge.

DeBlois, B. M., Garwin, R. L., Kemp, R. S., & Marwell, J. C. (2004). Space weapons: crossing the US Rubicon. International Security, 50-84.

Baucom, D. R. (2017). The Rise and Fall of Brilliant Pebbles 1. In United States Military History 1865 to the Present Day (pp. 329-376). Routledge.

Hitchens, T., & Samson, V. (2004). Space-based interceptors: still not a good idea. Georgetown journal of international affairs, 21-29.

National Research Council. (2012). Making sense of ballistic missile defense: An assessment of concepts and systems for US boost-phase missile defense in comparison to other alternatives. National Academies Press.

Borger, J. (2005). Bush likely to back weapons in space. The Guardian, 19.

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Special thanks to: Bernard McGee, James Sanger, Elliot Miller, Brian Busbee, Jerome Barakos M.D., Amadeo Bee, TTST, Balkrishna Heroor, Chris LaClair, John H. Austin Jr., OnlineBookClub.org, Eric Sexton, John Kiehl, Diffbot, Gnare, Dave Kircher, Burt Humburg, Blake Byers, Evgeny Skvortsov, Meekay, Bill Linder, Paul Peijzel, Josh Hibschman, Mac Malkawi, Mike Schneider, John Bauer, Jim Buckmaster, Juan Benet, Sunil Nagaraj, Richard Sundvall, Lee Redden, Stephen Wilcox, Marinus Kuivenhoven, Michael Krugman, Cy 'kkm' K'Nelson, Sam Lutfi

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Written by Petr Lebedev, Derek Muller, and Emily Zhang
Filmed by Trenton Oliver, Derek Muller, Petr Lebedev, Emily Zhang, Raquel Nuno, and Eddie Lopez
Animation by Mike Radjabov, Fabio Albertelli, and Jonny Hyman
Edited by Trenton Oliver
Slow Motion Camera: Shawn Sanders and Anthony Corrales
Sandcastle Timelapse by Greg LeBon and Archisand
Phantom rental from Panny Hire LA
Helicopter Pilots: Rick Shuster and Cliff Fleming
Helicopter Safety Officer: Ryan Hosking
FPV Drone Pilots: Sammie Saing and Josh Ewalt
Production Assistants: Roman Bacvic and Eddie Lopez
Intern: Katie Barnshaw
Additional video/photos supplied by Pond5 and Getty Images
Music from Epidemic Sound
Thumbnail by Ignat Berbeci
Produced by Derek Muller, Petr Lebedev, and Emily Zhang

This is the biggest, most ambitious, most expensive video I've ever made, and it's also going to be terrifying.

We are strapping these giant metal weights to the belly of that helicopter, flying it up several kilometers in the sky,

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

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 Pernell 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 ICBMs 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 1 of these tungsten rods and have it re-enter the atmosphere and strike a target in minutes.

You know, in orbit, things go about 8 kilometers per second.

And as it enters the atmosphere, it's going to 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 3 kilometers per second.

This is MOAB, which stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast, but it's more commonly referred to by its nickname, the Mother of All Bombs.

It is 1 of the most powerful non-nuclear explosives on the planet.

When it detonated, it released the equivalent of 11 tons of TNT.

Now, just 1 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 Purnell 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 object's 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 100.

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 6 kilometers per second.

And this is a real problem for satellites.

Because of the massive speeds on orbit, micrometeorites, small bolts, or even flecks of paint are serious risks for the astronauts living on board 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.

I mean, could this weapon ever become a reality?

Well, that's why we're here in the middle of the desert.

We want to 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.

It'll endure the test of the highest weight at the highest drop with very little damage.

that drop, we're gonna try to hit this swimming pool with a 100 kilogram or 220 pound mass, probably go up about 500 meters, try to drop a weight right into this pool.

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?

So the way we're targeting is with GPS, we're gonna take a GPS mark from like the center of the pool.

to 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.

My GPS is my phone and I have the coordinates written on my arm.

First drop and it's feeling shaky I gotta tell ya.

We've got another 700 feet to be at 1500.

I just don't know why they're circling up that high.

But 1500 feet, that seems higher than 1500 feet.

It's swinging around like crazy up there.

Why didn't we have this conversation a week ago?

We're good left to right, that's good, we just need to go forward.

That does not look like they're in position, right?

Was you showing the same thing back there?

That's just going to show you what's going to 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 0.

Falling from 500 meters, the rod accelerated for 10 seconds.

And even accounting for air resistance, it hit the ground going about

At that speed with a mass of 100 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 6 times higher.

Then its energy on impact will be greater than the explosion of a kilogram of TNT.

If you look at the craters on the moon and you look really closely, you're going to see that they're basically all circles.

I think no 1 stops to ask, why are they circular?

If you imagine when the moon gets hit by asteroids, they're going to 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.

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 going to 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.

So we're gonna do it, you know, 300 feet visually.

Cube drop is interesting because I was like, we shouldn't do a cube drop.

We're here talking about rods of 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 if given enough chance.

I would have thought like, you know, a pencil type thing, it would tend to aim straight down.

It doesn't look like they're over the pool.

Did you look like we were right above it?

Those ice shower doors were right on it as well.

Okay, we're setting up to drop this mass 200 kilograms 440 pounds what do you think?

We've had 2 misses so far, so we're going 50 meters or 150 feet above the pool, which for me is pretty disappointing.

But at this point I just want to hit something.

This morning I was so worried that we weren't gonna hit anything.

And like, I think the footage is so shaky because I was so excited but like seeing that from above was amazing

Wow it ripped right through the pool Unbelievable Sarah is the next target the sandcastle And you want to go for 100 meters?

If we can actually hit the sandcastle from 100 meters, that'll be something.

In all the different incarnations of rods from God, the rods are made out of tungsten.

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 3, 500 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 goal is to hit the target with as much speed as possible.

Aerodynamics is why arrows and bullets and ballistic missiles all look the way they do.

Honestly, 1 of the big mistakes we made was not welding fins onto our rods.

We're going up to about 100 meters or 300 feet before we drop.

We're going to hit the Sandcastle City, that's the goal.

There it goes, There it goes, there it goes, there it goes, it's going.

So the tractor's going to dig the weight out right now, just pick it up.

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Testing the US Military’s Worst Idea