Original subtitles

Today, on Impossible Engineering, the fastest in the universe.

The most ambitious space mission in history.

The space launch system will be the most powerful rocket that's ever left the

face of the Earth.

And the fastest passenger train on the planet.

The mind lab is faster than the phone on one car. It is flying along.

It took revolutionary engineering.

Wow. It looks like something out of the future.

that made the impossible possible.

Four, three, two, one.

NASA has been at the cutting edge of space travel for over 50 years.

From man's first step on the moon,

To the epic International Space Station.

And today, they're hard at work on their next project.

A mission to top every mission that came before it.

Taking humanity to Mars.

Mars is like a holy grail of space exploration.

Designing a spacecraft that can survive the over 100 million mile journey to the

red planet is an epic engineering challenge.

Orion is just a huge engineering thief.

The best engineers in the world are all working right here on this project.

This isn't easy.

We're going to space.

If it was easy, everybody would be doing it.

At the core of the revolutionary Orion spacecraft is the crew capsule.

It's the largest NASA has ever built.

Fifteen feet in diameter with enough space to accommodate four astronauts.

It's a state -of -the -art service module.

Equipped with unique life support and propulsion systems and four winged solar

arrays spanning nearly 60 feet across, Orion will travel farther into deep

than any other human exploration vehicle in history.

But to get there, NASA must get Orion's massive space capsule off the ground and

into orbit.

And when you fly a mission like that, you have to take a lot of components

you, a lot of equipment.

With that crew, they're going to be gone a long time.

In order to push all of that equipment a long way away, it has to be very

powerful.

To create a rocket that's both fast and powerful enough, NASA engineers look to

the innovators of the past for inspiration.

They draw from the pioneering work of American engineer Robert Goddard, who

built the world's first liquid fuel rocket.

Space historian Amy Shearer Teitel is in Roswell, New Mexico, recreating one of

Goddard's landmark engineering feats.

This rocket is a replica of the A -5 built by rocket pioneer Robert Goddard

1935.

And it was in this desert landscape away from populated areas that Goddard was

first able to fire his rockets to really show how powerful they were.

Burning gasoline and liquid oxygen together in a combustion chamber creates

high -pressure, high -velocity stream of hot gas.

Passing it up through two pipes and down a nozzle accelerates the flow of the

gas even more.

producing thrust to propel the rocket upward.

The higher the temperature, the greater the thrust.

This is actually a replica of his 1926 rocket that he used as a proof -of

-concept demonstration of the power of liquid propulsion.

He named it Nell, and it flew 41 feet in just two seconds before it crashed.

It was a short but incredibly significant flight.

Goddard created the blueprint for the modern rocket.

Over time, Goddard successfully launched 34 liquid -fueled rockets,

reaching altitudes as high as one and a half miles at speeds approaching

750 miles an hour.

And today... One of his engineering masterpieces, the A -5 rocket, has been

replicated by the Albuquerque Rocket Society and is set to launch in the New

Mexican desert.

That's amazing!

Oh!

You can just imagine Robert Goddard and his team being out here doing this exact

same thing 80 years ago.

But to reach Mars, the engineers of the Orion spacecraft must supercharge

Goddard's ingenious design.

Orion's solid rocket boosters will generate over 75 % of its thrust,

the spacecraft to carry a payload of almost 80 tons.

The rocket's core stage is a giant fuel tank.

It will store the cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen used to power

Orion's four RS -25 engines.

In March 2015, tests begin in the Utah desert.

The world's largest solid rocket motor generates a jaw -dropping 3 .6 million

pounds of thrust.

the equivalent of 14 jumbo jets at maximum power.

But that's not enough. For Orion's monumental journey to Mars, NASA's

must make these rockets even more powerful.

In just a few more years down the road, our 130 -metric -ton version of the

Space Launch System will be able to take nearly 140 tons of payload.

Ultimately taking habitats and equipment and, of course, astronauts to the

surface of Mars.

But keeping Orion's crew safe in the capsule on the nearly 300 -day journey

Mars is a huge engineering challenge.

We have to deal with the vacuum of space, the extreme temperature

the zero gravity environment, things that the human body is not used to.

This would be impossible without the daring attempt made by one scientist

a century ago.

Pioneering aviators rapidly discovered that the atmosphere changes dramatically

as you go up.

The air gets a lot colder, but it also gets a lot thinner. It gets much harder

to breathe.

And that's because if the pressure goes down, the oxygen molecules are more

spread out, and you just can't breathe deeply or fast enough to compensate for

that.

Today's flight is only hovering around 2 ,000 feet, so a vacuum jar and pump

will simulate high altitudes, unforgiving conditions.

You can see now that as we're sucking the air out of the vacuum jar... the

marshmallows are starting to expand. That's because they contain little

of air.

And as the pressure on the outside of the marshmallows fall, those little

pockets of air start to expand.

Now, if that was me going up to ever higher altitude, closer to that vacuum,

then the pockets of gas inside my body would start to expand.

Poor guy.

Because of this, traveling beyond the stratosphere was thought to be an

impossible feat.

It took revolutionary engineering to break through this glass ceiling.

For centuries, going beyond the stratosphere was believed to be

the daring scientist August Picard proposed an audacious idea.

Picard wanted to travel high into the atmosphere to study cosmic rays, so he

knew if he was going to do this and survive, he was going to have to take

Earth's atmosphere with him.

He came up with the notion of a pressurized capsule.

Drawing from submarine technology, Picard's sealed pressurized capsule used

air recycling system to keep pilots alive for up to 10 hours.

Once inside, the oxygen was supplied by liquid oxygen evaporating from a

container, and the carbon dioxide was scrubbed from the atmosphere by a

with soda lime.

In 1931, a huge hydrogen -filled balloon successfully lifted Picard and his

assistant to almost 50 ,000 feet.

Outside, it was freezing cold. It would have been impossible to breathe.

They really were incredibly brave pioneers of their time.

To get its crew to Mars, Orion will travel six million times further than

Picard's two -man capsule.

To save weight on NASA's largest ever capsule.

Designers fabricate the inner shell with a super lightweight lithium alloy.

Orion's capsule will be 15 feet in diameter and large enough to accommodate

to four astronauts.

This crew cabin structure has to stay together, not leak, perform flawlessly

its mission.

To make Orion's capsule airtight.

Engineers face a historically challenging side to the construction

When people talk about welding, they think heat.

They see a torch, they see a rod, and they see sparks.

And that was welding. You know, that's fusion welding, heat.

But this time -consuming technique deforms the metal as it cools.

NASA's engineers have come up with an ingenious solution.

Unlike traditional fusion welding, they're making seamless joints through a

groundbreaking approach called friction stir welding.

In friction stir welding, you never actually melt the metal.

You get to a stage called plasticizing. So you're actually rubbing against the

metal, heating it up, but never reaching the melting point, forming one solid

piece of metal across.

Orion's capsule will also need a life support system for its astronauts.

So NASA engineers are building the largest ever service module to pair with

Orion's super -sized crew capsule.

The service module's twin liquid oxygen tanks will provide astronauts with

breathable air at sea level pressure during their nine -month journey to

The life support systems include oxygen, oxygen regeneration,

maintaining temperature, maintaining humidity, some things you never think

on Earth because the environment takes care of it for you.

NASA's goal is to develop a system that can power the Orion capsule and service

module for up to three years in deep space. To do this, engineers are

four giant solar arrays capable of providing a staggering 11 kilowatts of

As the Orion engineering team focuses on their first test flight, it will have a

host of new technology to call on as it navigates through space.

First of all, of course, we have the Deep Space Radio Network, which is

-based tracking equipment from Earth dishes that uses the information carried

in a radio signal to actually navigate the spacecraft.

But as the Orion capsule heads further away from Earth and into deep space, its

crew will increasingly have to look to the stars for answers, just like their

nautical predecessors.

For its multi -million mile journey to Mars, Orion will be the fastest manned

spacecraft ever to reach deep space.

And in the same way sailors use the heavens to navigate, Orion must also

the stars.

NASA has a very good understanding of stars and their relationship to one

another. There's been a lot of mapping of the universe to understand where the

stars and the planets are.

To help the crew navigate with StarMaps, Greg Holt tests a cutting -edge

navigational device in NASA's state -of -the -art optical tunnel.

So this is the Orion Optical Navigation Camera System.

And the camera is actually looking at a simulated image of the moon that's not

unlike the image that it would be taking in space.

We're going to run that through the image processing routines on board to

actually extract measurements.

This brand new system can calculate critical dimensions, such as the

the moon and the angle of separation between the moon and the stars, allowing

astronauts to plot their location to a matter of feet.

It's the newest way to determine where your spacecraft's position and velocity

is in space.

But staying on course isn't the only challenge astronauts need to deal with

during their nine -month journey to Mars.

Once we're out of Earth's orbit, we're going to have to dock to a habitat if

we're going to stay out there for any period of time.

At Lockheed Martin's Space Operations Simulation Center, engineers are

NASA's first -ever automated docking system to bring vital supplies to the

spacecraft.

So what we're doing now is simulating the motion of a final approach to a

destination to see if the navigation system can actually correct the vehicle

motion.

Normally requiring five astronauts, this new automated approach uses a series of

laser -guided sensors.

The closing velocity has to be very slow, typically about a tenth of a foot

second. But we're traveling.

At 17 ,000 miles an hour, we have to be within a couple centimeters of accuracy.

You don't want to come in too hard because you can then damage the docking

There's no spares.

They don't grow on trees.

As difficult as it will be to send a human to Mars, it's the trip back to

that presents the biggest challenge.

This will be the first time we have ever brought anything back from the surface

of Mars, particularly something as big as the Orion spacecraft.

As it enters Earth's atmosphere, Orion will be traveling 35 times faster than a

speeding bullet.

Its state -of -the -art heat shield will protect the crew from temperatures

hotter than molten lava.

But heat isn't the problem.

We're still going very fast, thousands of miles an hour. So it's a very big

challenge to be able to slow down a 20 ,000 -pound vehicle all the way down to

20 miles an hour.

To complete the final stage of its flight, Orion must rely on a simple but

form of engineering, the parachute.

Physicist Andrew Steele is experiencing what an astronaut goes through during

Earth re -entry.

When we jump out of the aircraft, there'll be two forces acting on me and

George. Gravity pulling us down and air resistance pushing us up. And the air

resistance gets larger the faster we go.

So eventually we'll be going so fast that the force of air resistance will

balance the gravity pushing us down. And that means we'll have a resource called

terminal velocity.

For an average man or woman, this constant speed levels out at around 125

per hour after 15 seconds of free fall.

But if you want to slow down a much larger, faster -moving

object, a solid canopy like this would be ripped to shreds.

So NASA looks to the past for inspiration.

And the solution to this problem came from a young German engineer named Theo

Knack.

Theo's ribbon parachute design revolutionized high -speed air travel.

Its ring -shaped canopy was broken into a series of vented ribbons, allowing

enough drag to slow the aircraft down, but leaking enough air to reduce the

stresses on the canopy.

With this breakthrough design, Aircraft could land on shorter runways,

decelerating from higher speeds faster and safer than ever before.

Man, it's good fun too.

NASA engineers will rely on Theo Nack's 80 -year -old ribbon parachute design

for Orion's re -entry.

But the largest space capsule NASA has ever built is going to need a super

-sized parachute.

July 2012, engineers attempt their first low -velocity airdrop.

The proper test would be a spacecraft, rather expensive.

So what we've been able to do is integrate our parachutes into something

looks exactly like the spacecraft and then practice deploying.

A total of 11 chutes gradually slow the capsule down from a speed of around 350

miles per hour.

The 23 -foot drogue chute's simplified ribbon design stabilized the capsule,

reducing Orion's velocity down to 100 miles per hour before the pilot chutes

pull out, deploying the three colossal mains.

When you look at a main, you can look at the fabric in here, and if you go

calculate the surface area of this parachute, it is roughly 12 ,600 square

So think about your house or your apartment.

How many of those would fit in one of these is impressive.

By the time we get to the water, we're in steady state descent.

When we hit the water, we're traveling roughly 20 miles an hour.

After years of development and testing by thousands of engineers, December 2014

marks Project Orion's first major milestone.

Five, four, three, two, one.

And liftoff.

The new era of American space exploration.

The state -of -the -art spacecraft soars to over 3 ,000 miles in its first

unmanned test flight.

We're back in space business now. Oh, yeah.

With a successful unmanned test flight, Orion's designers now have their sights

set on taking humanity to Mars.

This is a tough task.

We're up to it.

I think once we finally do it, we could look back and say it's the greatest

thing we've achieved.

Also flying through space is the fastest passenger train on Earth.

The thing that's different and very unique about the Maglas is the fact that

it's slow.

A train that defies the most basic laws of motion.

Wow. It looks like something out of the future.

Shanghai is the largest and most populous city in China.

With 23 million people and counting, its demand for space runs high.

Shanghai is busy.

Cars as well as buildings, sites with space on the ground, it can be very

difficult to move around.

By the beginning of the 21st century, Shanghai streets were at maximum

A heavily congested eight -lane highway was the city's only link to the Pudong

International Airport.

China's solution, the Shanghai Maglev.

Meaning trans -rapid, the Maglev is a cutting -edge high -speed train, the

fastest in the world.

It hasn't got any wheels. It flows across the guideway all the way to the

airport.

Not only that, the train has no engine.

But before engineers could design their futuristic train with no engine or

wheels, they had to figure out a way to fit it into the already overcrowded

streets of Shanghai.

Like all the buildings around here, the only place really to build is to go up.

It's a challenge faced by one of the world's most populous cities over 100

ago.

To construct the world's fastest train in the middle of the already bustling

Shanghai, engineers look to the past for inspiration.

Chicago is also one of the world's busiest and crowded cities.

But the city's early planners came up with an idea over 100 years ago.

that still keeps the city moving today.

So this is the solution that was developed to elevate the city's rail

above the street traffic.

It is cheaper, of course, than building subways.

Work began in 1892, and the system was a big hit.

It was lovingly nicknamed the L, short for elevated.

The growth of the L and the growth of Chicago are synonymous.

The boom of population in the late 19th century follows right along with the

growth of this transit system.

And I don't think without the L we would have had this great, vibrant American

city that we have today.

Engineers of the Shanghai Maglev have taken Chicago's century -old solution of

an elevated railroad and created their own 19 -mile guideway high above the

streets.

But building this comes with some unique challenges.

Shanghai sits in an area of great seismic activity.

It also has weak clay soil.

The risk of liquefaction is very high.

Liquefaction is an unusual and dramatic phenomenon that can occur during an

earthquake when solid ground turns to mush.

The maglev designers had to ensure the tracks wouldn't sink into the soft soil.

So engineers developed a technique called piling.

They built each support pier on top of a giant concrete cap.

Underneath the caps are concrete piles, which are driven 200 feet into the

ground, over 2 ,500 in total.

If the soil near the surface liquefies, the deep roots will hold the maglev

track in place.

To get a train up to speeds pushing 500 kilometers an hour, designers would be

faced with the problem of wind resistance or drag.

To build a train that can break 300 miles per hour, engineers had to look

to the great innovations of the past for the solution.

Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, train design was at a

Train design fundamentally hadn't changed for 100 years since this was

Stevenson's rocket.

You can see the classic cylindrical boiler. We've got the smoke stuck at the

front and this completely snub, flat, un -aerodynamic nose.

It would take a radical thinker to shake things up.

And in the 1930s... steam locomotive engineer Nigel Gressley designed a new

sleek machine that would at the time be the fastest train in the world.

The Mallard.

Everything about this locomotive is designed to go as fast as possible.

You've got these massive wheels driving it forward.

We've got a double chimney to suck out the exhaust as quickly as possible at

high speed. And then you've got this beautiful streamlined shape in stark

contrast to the trains that had come before.

At the University of Birmingham's train rig in England, engineers test the

aerodynamics of model trains shaped like the Millard.

This is the test track. It's 150 metres long, and we can accelerate trains to 75

metres a second, which is over 250 kilometres an hour.

Today, we've got two different trains that we're going to be testing. This is

flat -nosed freight train, which represents sort of an un -aerodynamic

they were originally designed. And this one here is a high -speed train with a

sloped nose.

We're going to see what difference that makes to the speed the train can travel

at.

The model trains are fired using giant rubber catapults, and their speed is

documented between two separate locations called light gates.

I'm almost as tenth of the trainers.

Okay, pleasure.

There he goes.

First up is the flat -nosed train.

That was fast.

We've got two readings here.

At the first set of light gates, it was doing about 36 meters per second. But

then by the time the second set of light gates, just a couple of meters later,

it's only doing 34 and a half meters a second. So you can see it's lost some

speed. The aerodynamic drag has kicked in and slowed the train down.

In the short distance between gates, the flat -nosed train loses around 5 % of

its speed.

Next is the sloping -nosed model.

Based on the Millard.

Ready, aim, and fire.

Wow.

Because of its contour, the sloping nosed model is much faster, only losing

speed between the light gates.

So these numbers, they're quite subtly different, but when you scale it up to a

full -size train and you're looking to propel it constantly down the track,

can translate into a big change of efficiency.

The designers of the Shanghai Maglev have learned from the breakthroughs made

the Mallard.

and created a train that travels at speeds that innovator Nigel Gressley

have thought to be impossible.

You can see it has a very sleek, streamlined design with a very smooth,

sloping nose.

But the development of the futuristic maglev took decades of experimentation

before it reached its incredible 21st century performance levels.

Created in Germany, the first passenger -carrying prototype, the Transrapid

Maglev system, was unveiled in 1971.

It traveled at speeds where little consideration to aerodynamics was

But as experiments continued and speeds rapidly increased,

the train car design that now graces Shanghai's elevated track took shape.

But there were other design elements that the Maglev's engineers had to

if they wanted their train to achieve record -breaking speeds.

that provides friction on the train.

One of the biggest losses of energy that occurs in a traditional train is

produced by the friction between the wheels and the track.

The more friction there is, the more power is lost.

In a car like this, for example, one third of the fuel is spent on overcoming

friction.

To limit the negative effects of friction.

Engineers designed the maglev in a way that only some of history's most daring

engineers have attempted.

To design the fastest train in the world, engineers of Shanghai's maglev

overcome friction, a feat only achieved about 50 years ago.

Designed by engineer Jean Bertin in the 1960s, the Aerotrain 1 and 2 are the

only surviving prototypes that aim to change train travel forever.

A train system without wheels.

It looks like something out of the future.

Engineers and scientists have been toying with the idea of frictionless

for some time.

The idea is that if you can remove that frictional resistance to motion, then

you can make things travel faster and more efficiently.

The simplest way to do that might be to levitate it on a cushion of air, and

that's the principle behind how a hovercraft works.

We've got our own very simple model of a hovercraft here. It's just a CD with

the top of a drinks bottle on it and then a balloon.

Before we inject that cushion of air, the CD only moves a very small distance

across the table when I tap it.

However, what we can do is attach a balloon to this drinks bottle top and

that makes any difference to the way the CD moves.

So, there we go.

You can see that now, with a tiny tap, the CD moves a long way. And just as

as the balloon's got some pressure to force that air down underneath the CD,

then it'll keep on moving around freely.

In here, we've got the guts of the AeroTrain. And incredibly, there are

regular car engines which power massive fans, and that blasts air downwards to

lift the train up off the ground, and then inwards to keep it centered on the

track.

By 1967, the AeroTrain was proving its potential on the test track as the next

generation of passenger transport.

It planned to build a track for the Aerotrain between Paris and Orleans.

65 miles in 35 minutes.

The Aerotrain 2 was a futuristic combo

of fighter jet, race car, train, and hovercraft.

Bertin's ideas really were revolutionary.

They combined the principle of the hovercraft and a jet engine. This was

first time it had ever been done.

Combined, they smashed the rail speed record.

An aircraft jet engine gives initial thrust up to speeds of around 185 miles

hour. An additional rocket motor boosts the MPH to 235.

Sadly, Jean Bertin's dream of friction -free travel died in the 1970s when the

French government abandoned the experiment.

By building on the Aerotrain's revolutionary hovercraft design, the

also achieving record -breaking speed through levitation.

It's currently doing a top speed, flying pretty much at 431 km

an hour.

The Maglev is faster than the Formula One target. It is flying along.

But unlike the hovercraft design of the aerotrain, the Shanghai Maglev uses

powerful electromagnets on the underside of the train cars, allowing them to

float.

Guidance magnets keep the train centered, and support magnets pull the

the underside of the track, lifting the train above.

The entire train floats, suspended 10 millimeters below the track.

Because there's no contact between the train and the guideway, there is no

friction. And this means that the train can have a lifetime of up to 50 years

with minimum maintenance required.

But levitating is only half the battle.

The maglev has no engine, and propelling it with magnets would be impossible

without one of science's greatest innovators.

Despite not having an engine, the maglev is the fastest train on earth.

Achieving this would be impossible without a bold innovation from the past.

This is a heat of aluminum.

When I put it on the motor and switch on the magnet, something pretty dramatic

occurs.

Electrical genius Eric Lathwaite developed the first practical linear

motor, creating an effect he later dubbed the magnetic river.

First of all, it will levitate or support an aluminum plate.

It will guide it sideways, and it will also propel it along.

The linear motor takes a traditional coiled electric motor and unrolls it.

Instead of spinning a rotor, what was the coil or stator provides a bed that

drives the object along its length.

And there you have your modern vehicle being guided, listed,

and propelled all by means of the same set of coils.

Leithwaite's experiments provided the key that unlocked the potential of the

maglev.

The builders of the Transrapid Maglev system constructed a series of stator

blocks. They are the main component of the linear motor, making the bridge

itself act as the propulsion system for the train.

These stator blocks allow the train to both levitate and travel over 300 miles

an hour without an onboard engine.

thinking this whole track is electrified all the time.

Only the section in front of the maglev turns on.

As soon as the maglev has passed over the short section of track, it turns off

again.

And so on and so on, all the way to its destination.

Powerful computers adjust the electromagnet's current constantly.

and predict the train's travel time with microscopic accuracy.

Now this is the ambition of the maglev, with computer systems that enable to

achieve an extremely precise service.

It's taken decades of planning, design, and testing to create the world's only

commercially operating high -speed maglev.

It's a unique concept that throws away the rulebook for traditional train

and makes high -speed journeys possible in engine -less vehicles.

By drawing on the innovations of the past, adapting,

improving them, and making breakthroughs of their own, the designers and

engineers of the Orion and Shanghai Maglev have made these vessels amongst

fastest in the universe.

They've succeeded in making the impossible possible.

It is a vision of the future, and it's here right now.

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