What happens to the wire after launching a fly-by-wire missile?

Question

What happens to the wire after launching a fly-by-wire missile?

In: Engineering

Answer 1

A colleague of mine used to test fire fly-by-wire missiles and the wire is just discarded. This was on a large test range with god knows how many pieces of UXO out there, but because the land is shared for grazing with cows, he had to gather up all the wire after each shot. Apparently cows love to eat copper wire, but copper wire doesn’t love cows so if you don’t clean it up they’ll die.