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

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."

Comments

In Britain ..

[ethnocidal]

We had something like this running during the mid 1990s. The speeds were incredible; it used the three decade old mothballed British launch vehicle rocket motors, which were abandoned after our nuclear deterrent moved onto submarine launched ballistics.

The record would have been held by the land on which the rain never stops, but for the fact there were some irritating leaves on the line during summer and autumn months. Winter was ruled out by that pesky light dusting of snow, and after unfortunate incidents with hypersonic sparrows in spring, the whole project was abandoned in favour of the 'wobbly train' approach to high speed cornering.

Re:In Britain ..

[fyonn]

Are there even human beings "driving" it?

I think it's safe to say "no"

if there were humans driving it at the start then there wouldn't have been at the end. apart from the fact that the sled stopped yb hitting an immobile object, the humans would have been but a red paint job at the back of the cabin by then anyways

dave

Why they built it.

[MyNameIsFred]

Several posts have asked if this has military applications. The answer is yes for testing. They use the sled to examine the interactions between weapons and targets in a controlled dynamic environment. For example, you park an aircraft at the end of the rail. Shot a warhead down the track and let it hit the target.

Why not do this in the air? You can carefully place cameras and other instrumentations to observe the test. Afterwards, you can easily collect debris for further analysis.

Why set a new land-speed record? Think of the Republican Party's wildest dream -- National Missile Defense.

Sonic Wind 1

[wowbagger]

At the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center they have the original Sonic Wind 1 rocket sled. They also have a video loop of some of the test runs of this beast.

Remember that Sonic Wind was all about trying to determine what would happen to a pilot who ejected at speeds greater than Mach 1 - so the occupant of Sonic Wind 1 was sitting on the front of the sled without any windscreen.

In the video, as the craft exceeds Mach 1, you can see the shock waves (a.k.a. sonic booms) forming off the craft, including one forming off the pilot himself.

That always gets me.