It has been proposed that extending a long conducting wire from a spacecraft (a "tether") could be used for a variety of applications, from navigation to power generation. One of the first such experiments involving this technique was an August 1992 space shuttle flight, but the tether failed and only only 250 m of the conducting wire could be let out. A 40.0 V motional emf was generated in the Earth’s 5.0 × 10-5 T field, while the shuttle and tether were moving at 7.80 × 103 m/s.