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Land Speed Record Broken: 0-6,400 in Six Seconds

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the faster-than-a-speeding-bullet dept.

linuxwrangler writes "Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own two decades old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 3 mile track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at mach 8.6 or about 6,400 mph - it covered the last 1.8 miles in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 6,122 mph was set on Oct. 5, 1982. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo Daily News, the Denver Post, and CNN."

5 of 357 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong goal. by EasyTarget · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Wouldn't it be nice if humanity could do this super cool stuff without the ultimate aim being to find more efficient ways of killing people.

    The arms industry often shocks me, rarely awe's me.

    --
    "Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
    1. Re:Wrong goal. by protohiro1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Or the billionaire terrorist might grow a brain and just stick a hydrogen bomb in a shipping container and dentonate it in the port of long beach. Cheaper, easier and much more likely to succeed. Terrorists don't use ICBMS.

      --
      Sig removed because it was obnoxious
  2. Of Dubious Value? by JoseMonkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Call me cynical, but I'm trying to figure out if this type of research has real merit, or if it is entirely masturbatory. What's the point exactly?

    It's a military project, i.e., tax-payer funded, so I'd like to hear some relevant, practical uses for said technology. It sounds like it was used to deliver a bullet-type missle in this case. Something tells me that you couldn't really use this delivery method in an actual *war* . . .

  3. Re:In Britain .. by delphi125 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ok, I'll bite....

    First of all, a (rifle) bullet would not be able to break the land speed record - it would be travelling through the air.

    Secondly, a (long-range) rifle may have a high exit velocity (muzzle? I am not an expert), but this will only decrease after being shot - the bullet will be slowed down by air resistance.

    Finally, I know that laser pointers shout around 1c (speed of light), so it wouldn't be too hard to... oh wait, perhaps it IS hard? Perhaps that is why this is a record 20 years old being rebroken?

    Please feel free to think before you next post.

  4. Re:Metric Conversion by your_mother_sews_soc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'm sure we could take care of this using XML (or maybe not - I am ingorant in the area of XML). But if the W3C had included some "weights and measures" tags in the HTML standard then we could leave it up to the browser and/or client OS to apply localization rules and perform the proper conversions.

    Just a thought, but does anyone know of this was ever suggested?

    --
    My user name was a mistake. Input wasn't restricted, my bad.