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."

Re:meep-meep

[ccbaxter]

I see the first post speed record hasn't been broken...

fun

[UniverseIsADoughnut]

"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."

Weeeeeeee!!!!

Don't talk to me about the trains

[JohnCC]

You wait all morning for a train, then two come along at once! Pah! Thats my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Re:In Britain ..

[Munra]

Apparently First Great Western trains (that's a UK train company, for those not in the know) have begun trialling this technology for their mainline service between Bristol and London.

Theoretically the time for this journey could be cut to just over a minute, but taking into account the breaking zone needed, and the areas of 'slow track' where the train runs at 30Mph maximum, the estimated time for this journey would be somewhere in the region of 2 hours; a marked 5 minute saving in time.

Driver not Available for Comment

[Renegade Lisp]

I was wondering what the driver had to say after he got out of this thing, but then I did the maths...

Not sure if I interpret the numbers correctly, but for the acceleration I get 207 m/s^2 on the first, 4.65 sec stage, and 755 m/s^2 on the second, 1.3 sec stage, which is about 21g and 76g, respectively.

No, there wasn't a driver in this thing :-)

Darwin award winner did it first?

[petej]

I think the Darwin award winner from a few years back did this first -- you know, the guy who strapped a JATO unit to his Pinto.

Faster than..

[rf0]

..a curry through you on a Friday night

Rus

Beep beep!

[NonSequor]

Were they trying to catch a road runner or something?

Re:Wow...

[SamBeckett]

You mean like... a plane?

Michigan rules anyway... Why would you ever want to leave?

HA! That's nothing....

[gr8fulnded]

Anyone who's ever seen 95, N.VA, in the middle of rush hour isn't impressed.

I've seen 80 yr old ladies flying faster then that.

--Dave

isn't that enough

[SHEENmaster]

to detach a human retina!?

How can the driver code w/out his eyes!? Oh, forgot that others put national fame above coding. What nerds.

Re:In Britain ..

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Unfortunately there was a 3 hour delay caused by the "wrong type of rockets".

Rich.

Re:I wonder ...

[Rolo Tomasi]

I wonder if this has military implications?

No, the military never tests technology which might have military implications.

The poor train conductors

[Timesprout]

This is going to exhaust the train conductors here in the Netherlands trying to check tickets when the train is travelling that fast between stations.

what actually happened

[tankdilla]

At approximately 88 mph the vehicle became a blur and seemingly vanished, and after 6 seconds it appeared at the end of the track. A scientist known as "Doc" was subsequently questioned about the contribution of the controversial flux capacitor technology used to power the vehicle, but he declined to comment. All he kept saying was "Great Scott!!!"

Re:Stopping

[maharg]

from the first link at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/a/20 03/05/01/national1355EDT0644.DTL

The test, in a remote area of the base, started with a brilliant, multihued blaze of rocket engines and ended in a spray of sparks when a missile carried by the sled slammed into an immobile target. There was silence until a split second before the end, when earsplitting bursts rolled across the desert floor.

Seems like they have a fairly effective braking system. I wonder what the immobile target was ?

Challenge for Train spotters

[2sleep2type]

Rather tricky to get the numbers on this when it's passing through.

And in finacial news just in...

[NewtonsLaw]

Shares in the Acme Novelty company have risen 23 percent.

I have an old fiesta that can barely

[noogle]

get up to 60, you insensitive clod.

Re:Stopping

[Zog The Undeniable]

Syria?

In other news

[Timesprout]

Signs of nervousness in the Syrian leadership as the US announce they intend to build a new high speed rail link between Baghdad and Damascus as a gesture of goodwill.

Re:Wow...

[Coelacanth]

Great idea. As long as you don't mind arriving in the form of slightly lumpy, reddish-brown slurry.

Take the extra hour or two, and fly :-)

Re:Beep beep!

[Alsee]

Were they trying to catch a road runner or something?

Yep! Zero to 6,400 in six seconds and 6,400 to zero in 0.002 seconds when he hit the tunnel painted on the side of the mountain.

-

Re:Stopping

[scharkalvin]

Bin Laden sitting in a Bently?

Re:Metric Conversion

[betat]

"Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at mach 8.6 or about 10300 km/h"

bah..you and your metric and imperial units.

What we really want to know is...how fast is that in Libraries of Congress(LOC)/second.

Re:In Britain ..

[The Dobber]

I remeber hearing a story about a guy who got hold of some JATO rockets (the kind they use for getting big jets to takeoff faster) and strapped them to the side of his car. He took it out into..........

Oh, err, nevermind

How much faster?

[flamingdog]

Damn, that thing would probably go faster than light if it had a 5" exhaust pipe that made it sound like a go-kart, a body kit, a spoiler higher than its roof, new rims and low profile tires, and a paint job that made it look like vaginal expulsions...

I mean, wow, what if those scientists really fucking knew what they were doing and did some of those high-tech mods like new spark plug wires, and painting the engine block? Holy shit...

Oh wait...nevermind...

but ...

[The Clockwork Troll]

That thing got a hemi?

Re:Metric Conversion

[Snotboble_]

Who in the World would use METRICS? Such a complicated system where you have to *add* and *remove* 0's to convert?

No, it's _way_ easier to remember that there's 5280 feet on the mile and 202 US gallons on the cubic yard. Who can remember that there's 1000 meters on the kilometer? Or 1000 liters on the cubic meter? How non-standard is that?

Besides, who else than the rest of the World uses metric anyway?

Re:In Britain ..

[BriSTO(V)L]

Are there even human beings "driving" it? No: My bet is on 6th generation space worms driving it...

Re:How much faster?

[jolshefsky]

Well, that's how they did it--they just took the same sled design from 1982 and painted "Type-R" on it to get it to go faster.

Land speed record

[maccrapper]

They should of had my wife driving..

Re:Stopping

[Olmy's Jart]

Seems like they have a fairly effective braking system. I wonder what the immobile target was ?

Uh... History?

Re:Metric Conversion

[4of12]

Damn straight.

That's why I always quote my gasoline mileage in inverse acres.

Re:Why they built it.

[GrubInCan]

This is one way that you can guarantee sucessful targeting by the missile defense system.

When you see incomming missiles, you quickly build a railway up to the missiles and crash big nasty trains into them.

OK, I'll say it

[barzok]

6400 MPH should be enough for anyone.

Re:Wrong goal.

[thrillseeker]

Which would you prefer?

Re:Metric Conversion

[Saltine]

Good start, but you haven't converted all the way, for those of us who don't want to think in crazy units based on mulitples of twelve, or non-absolute scales with arbitrary datum points:

"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own 631 megaseconds old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 kilometer track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at Mach 8.6 or about 2.86 kilometers per second - it covered the last 2.9 kilometers in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 2.74 kilometers per second was set at 432 petaseconds. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo 86400-Secondly News, the Denver Post, and CNN."

(My apologies to those outside the US, for not using "kilometres" or "432 billiard seconds" and whatnot.)

--Saltine

Re:Metric Conversion

[pmz]

Q: How does a Unix guru have sex? A: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount;fsck;more;yes;umoun t;sleep

A real UNIX guru would put that into a script run by a cron task that pages him (obviously a him writing scripts like this) upon successful execution.

Re:Why they built it.

[pmz]

They use the sled to examine the interactions between weapons and targets in a controlled dynamic environment.

That's what they wrote, but, really, they just thought it would be cool to see something going mach 8 hit a wall. Who wouldn't want to see that?

Re:Metric Conversion

[Palshife]

...in roughly 6 seconds.

What the hell? No metric time?

Allow me to assist, assuming that the earth's rotation yields 10 kilodeconds (or "Kil's", as in "What Kil is it?") a day, where 1 decond = 0.1157407 seconds (407 repeating).

So, once again the article in full metric glory.

"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own two decades old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 km track in roughly .694 deconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at mach 8.6 or about 24720 km/kilodecond - it covered the last 2.9 km in just 0.150 deconds. The previous record of 23642.4 km/kilodecond was set on Oct. 5, 1982. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo Daily News, the Denver Post, and CNN."

Re:what actually happened

[AragornSonOfArathorn]

This is heavy.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Begins with A, kind of rhymes with Tampax...

Ampax...
Abax...
Acax...
Adax...
Afax...
Af ac...
AFLAC!

You mean that Donald Rumsfeld convinced Saddam Hussein to buy supplemental life insurance? I'm sure this came in handy if his primary policy didn't cover vaporization by four bunker-busters!

Mr Science says:

[RealAlaskan]

... who else than the rest of the World uses metric anyway?

It's only the rest of the world who uses metric, so who cares.

I can tell you WHY they use it: expressing their speeds in kilometers per hour makes it sound as if they're really going fast. It helps make up for their dinky cars with under nourished hamsters for engines. The metric system is really just a coping mechanism for an inferiority complex.

If we wanted to bring the rest of the workd back to the traditional system, all we'd have to do is start quoting our speeds in furlongs per fortnight [jardine-engineering.com]. Since the American brown snail can travel at about 15 furlongs per fortnight, it's plain that our speed numbers would again exceed theirs, and their coping mechanism would be shattered. They would have to come flocking back to our familiar, traditional system.

It might seem a harsh thing, but it would be best for them. The additional arithmatic skill required by the traditional units is clearly the explanation for the United State's consistant superiority in all things mathematical over the benighted metric world.

Re:Metric Conversion

[Noren]

Close, but this clearly should be in scientific notation, for those of us who don't want to use and remember all those prefixes.

"Researchers at Holloman AFB have broken their own 6.49 x 10^8 seconds old land speed record for rail vehicles. The rocket powered sled covered the 4.8 x 10^3 meter track in roughly 6 seconds. Preliminary numbers put the sled's speed at Mach 8.6 or about 2.86 x 10^3 meters per second - it covered the last 2.9 x 10^3 meters in just 1.3 seconds. The previous record of 2.74 x 10^3 meters per second was set at 1982-10-05 [cam.ac.uk]. Other accounts are at the Alamogordo 8.64 x 10^4 secondly News, the Denver Post, and CNN."

There, that's much better, right?

Re:Wrong goal.

[EasyTarget]

Nearly right, actually I was thinking of AMTRAK

Re:Metric Conversion

[ncc74656]

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 make sure NASA doesn't have a hand in the conversion algorithms if you're going to do that...

Re:Metric Conversion

[Saltine]

You're right, of course. Dang, I wish I had thought of that 1.00 x 10^0st.

--Saltine

yeah, but...

[Tumbleweed]

Did it have a VTEC sticker on it?