The STS-75 tether

During Columbia's STS-75 mission a satellite on a long tether broke free and drifted away from the shuttle. According to the archive's one telling it ended up some 300 miles off, and as a camera tracked it, sphere-like phenomena swarmed around the line "like a hornet's nest". The telling's key claim is that some of the spheres are plainly behind the twelve-mile tether, which it says rules out ice crystals near the lens.

What is on the record

The fact sheet dates the break to 25 February 1996; the mission itself flew in February and March 1996. The archive holds one telling from one channel and resolves one claimant, Martin Stubbs. He spells his name Martyn in his own publications, and he recorded NASA feeds from a cable studio rather than from orbit.

Outside the archive's holdings the tether is a documented failure. It broke on 25 February 1996 with roughly 19.7 kilometres deployed, which is the twelve miles of the telling. The explanation of record for the discs is small debris and ice close to the camera and far out of focus, which a video lens renders as large pale shapes with a notch. The tether looks sharp because it is far away. A particle a few centimetres from the lens can seem to drift behind it. That is the ordinary reading, not a settlement.

Why it sits where it does

L0 is the grade: a single account. The archive counts how many independent sources carry a story, and here one tape reached it through one interpreter. What drifted around the STS-75 tether is not resolved here.