 at the pool. The tether has broken, it is going away from us. Get it on the TV, Claude. Please get it on the TV. The tether has broken. Copy. And Jeff, we're tracking it with the radar and we do read zero tension. Dave, it's like all the tether is outside of the boom and well away from the orbiter. We've got some tether inside the boom. Maybe it looks like about 8 or 10 meters. So it broke inside the boom, it seems. We've got the brake on and we don't see any tether movement. It's just laying inside the boom. Copy all, Andy. And stand by. Okay, Andy, and we want to completely verify you have a visual on the satellite and the tether is moving away from the shuttle. I'd like some words on that. We had a visual on the satellite up until we got into darkness here. We'll go ahead and try to pick it back up, but at the time that we had it, all the tether was heading up towards the satellite and was well away from us. It looks like we still have a radar lock, so we could keep that for a little bit, unless you guys are tracking it better than we are. We have an image. Okay, and what you're seeing now, we were using the 350. Do you confirm you are seeing the picture? Affirmative, Jeff. Good image. Okay, this is taken through the EOS 350 millimeter lens. We were photographing the shape of the tether, and you can see it just starting to go slack now. Unfortunately, in all the excitement, somebody bumped the camera and we lost it, either we had of it, as it was, and we got it for a minute or so before sunset. Yes, sir. Well, those are some tether dynamics we did not want to see. We have demonstrated that you can generate a lot of electricity with tether, and unfortunately, we've also demonstrated that you can use tethers to launch a satellite into a much higher orbit. And FIDO concurs, that was one of our objectives. Two of our objectives, at least. In fact, we can see it picked up about an 80 foot per second boost. Being able to capture some of it before visual motion again here, sir, and it looks like it's going in. Copy, Scott. Thank you. Roger, we see it. Back with you on the West at 2206. That's a beautiful shot of an amazing piece of equipment. Commander Amy Witte from WHNT TV, I'm going to play the devil's advocate here. How would you answer critics who say $443 million is a lot to lose and space research should be curbed? How would you respond to that? We need to take a hard look at what happened and why. And there isn't any research program, like I said, that doesn't have disappointments that come along the way. The value of it, I think, space research is an extremely valuable tool because every time we do something, we learn something. But I don't think there's a research program around that doesn't have its types of failures and can have some of that same criticism applied to it. We can't learn unless we go try. So I have not lost my excitement about what we try to do up here in space. Nor have I lost my enthusiasm. Nor do I think it has really lost its merit. I think it is tremendously commendable and worthwhile goal for us to keep on doing this type of research up here. We haven't seen the last of Tether's, I hope, and we just need to go ahead and take another hard look at it. This is Marcia Dunn of the Associated Press for Dr. Hoffman. I'm wondering if you could describe a little more your feelings of personal loss as you watched the Tether Cut and as you saw yours and yours of work just go out into nothingness. We have putting it because a lot of things were disappearing there. We all did have a lot of hope. We got about half way there in terms of being able to deploy the satellite and to just wet people's appetite for the incredible scientific investigations that could be covered. The scientists have lost a lot and I deeply feel for them and we were really looking forward to demonstrating that we could actually retrieve a satellite from 20 kilometers which of course is something that has never been done and we've put an incredible amount of work into that. And those of us here will probably never get a chance to do that. But in terms of personal feeling, really important, I think we've all been trying to say this, is that when you're working hard to try to develop new ideas, new science, new technology, you have setback. How many things did Thomas Edison try before he finally found a filament to make an electric light bulb? And I want to think back to STS-46 when we obviously also had a disappointment and one question was asked to us about what the purpose is, why we should keep doing this. And at that time what I did was to take out something that we brought on board and that is a copy of a book by Arthur Clark. The sounds of parents describes a very futuristic view of an application of tethers where someday there may be a tether system that would lead to a space elevator going from Earth all the way up to geosynchronous orbit. Tethers have the potential to revolutionize a lot of the ways we operate in space. Nobody said it's going to be easy. I would have hoped that after two flights we would have gotten a little farther than we got this time and I don't want to try to pretend that we're not pretty bitterly disappointed. But nevertheless, human lifetimes are short in the big scheme of things and hopefully these dreams will someday come true and our successors I hope will look back to the things that we've done and at least they can say that we helped to point the way. And if that's so then I think we'll all have gotten a lot of satisfaction from this.