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."

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.

I wonder ...

[Currawong]

From Newsday.com's article [newsday.com]:

The sled was designed to cover the first 1.4 miles in 4.65 seconds, then speed up in the final stages and cover 1.8 miles in 1.3 seconds, Kurtz said. At the end, bolts were detonated to allow the missile to detach from the sled and successfully hit its target.

I wonder if this has military implications?

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

G - forces

[krygny]

I'd be interested to know how many G's you'd pull at that rate of acceleration. Yes, I know, I could dust off my old physics text books and calculate it. But I'm not that interested and I'm not posting it as a challenge because it's not that hard, so don't go there.

Just a thought, even though I'm too lazy.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Ben Hutchings]

While Britain, France, Germany and Russia are busy making money selling lower-tech weapons to dictatorships.

Re:Well Rounded Education

[Anonymous Coward]

And you wonder why people make fun of Humanitites students.

It is NOT opinion that allows the Fabrication of CPUs that run at 3 Gigahertz. Nor Opinion that puts satelites in orbit. Nor for that matter opinion that allows for relativistic effects in the timing of GPS signals.

Astrology is NOT a science. 'Nuff Said.

And if you can process and internalise 3 books a week, I might be tempted to deride the complexity of the content.

Incidently, what does "Peace be to God" mean ? Are you wishing that noone should wage war on Him ? Are you concerned that He may be besieged by other deities ? Surely you are not "Narrow Minded" enough to rule out multiple gods ?

Blues Skies,
Soft Landings.
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.

Re:Wrong goal.

[Moschaef]

Actually, this is part of an effort to save lives. It's being developed by the Missile Defense Agency and if used operationally, it will probably save millions of lives. Just existing provides monumental deterrence to rogue countries like North Korea or some billionaire terrorist who has purchased an old soviet missile.

For those who think it will instigate an arms race, do you really think they can build more ICBMs than we can build ABMs? One former super power, The USSR, tried to match our military industry and had to declare bankruptcy; so I don't think China or North Korea has a prayer.

Sonic Wind 1

[wowbagger]

At the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center [comso.org] they have the original Sonic Wind 1 [army.mil] 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.

One problem

[donscarletti]

Oct. 5, 1982

Sorry for being whiney but I think all metric using, english speaking countries put the day before the month, i.e. 5th Oct. 1982 or 5/10/1982. Forming a nice natural progression between the smallest unit and the largest unit.

Of course I think the system that is used by the Japaneese amoung others, is even better: yyyy mm dd forming the same progression as the hindu arabic number system by putting the largest unit first.

I think around the world only three countries do not have a unit magnitude based progression, one of them is the US, another of them is somewhere in scandinavia and I think the other one may be Korea but I don't know, I should ask my Korean friend next time I see him.

Re:Land speed record primer

[drinkypoo]

It's pretty lame though, if UT Austin just took their railgun and fired a hot wheels car out of it along the ground instead of into it, they'd be the new winners. I know it's not a requirement for the definition, but I don't think it's really a "vehicle" unless it has pilots. This is just a projectile.

The interesting land speed records are the cars with pilots, and the unpowered, using some sick-ass bicycles. I met the (former?) world record holder "Fast Freddy" in Santa Cruz a while back, where he is now working (at? for?) calfee making and designing carbon fiber recumbents. (As you probably know if you're way more into bikes than I ever will be, calfee is like the name in diamond-frame carbon fiber.)

Re:Stopping

[hoofie]

How about tons of concrete twenty feet thick reinforced with steel rod ?

There's a video of a reactor wall test at Sandia in 1993 where they strapped a F-4 Phantom to a track unit and shot it down the track with 35 rockets into this 'wall' at 475mph or so - the jet just turned to dust and all that was left was a black spot on the wall...(the weirdest thing on the video is plane was about two feet or wider than the wall, so the wingtips kept going after being sheared oh-so-neatly off. (can't find a picture, sorry)

Land speed record NOT broken

[ElfMagic]

Last August the Bomarr group, at a lab in Dallas, Texas, managed to accelerate a marble made of heavily compressed composite glass and steel fibers from zero to just over eight thousand miles an hour in four and one eights of a second.

The acceleration occured on a track while developing a new magnetic propulsion system that uses electromagnetics to spin an intricately spun sphere with a series of directional pulses. The compressed nature of the marble allowed it to be *very* lightweight and still strong enough to handle the force exerted upon it.

The technology is still being developed as a military defense mechanism to intercept things like unmanned spy planes without damaging them so much that useful data about the origin of the craft cannot be collected from the crash site.

Re:Wrong goal.

[SpinyNorman]

The US is only financially kept afloat due to loans from the rest of the world - $6.4T and increasing. The world next war is going to be an undeclared economic one, and the main weapon won't be a rocket powered sled - it'll be the Euro.

Re:In Britain ..

[mpe]

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.

The real irony is that some of the current trains First Great Western run actually take longer than when the service was run by GWR using steam powered trains.

Re:In Britain ..

[morcheeba]

IIRC track owners in the US tend to give priority to freight over passenger trains.

I forgot to tell the rest of the story. I went up to NY on the acela, but went back on the regular train ($50 cheaper or so). We didn't leave NYC until after our "arrival time" back home in DC. It turns out that some freight train with a too-tall car had run on or near our tracks and knocked the overhead electric wires down. How hard is it to put some equipment in to automatically detect this? It was my first train ride in the US, and all I could keep thinking was ... "if the federal government really wants amtrack to survive (and not keep bailing it out), and if amtrack wants to compete with airplanes, then they'd better have their own passenger tracks". I think you're exactly right - freight was the priority.

I did about 20G's

[spineboy]

When my car got forced off the road. The telephone pole stopped me in about 2 feet from about 35 MPH.

My fist left an imprint in the windshield - like those nail thingys you see in the joke gift shops.
Broke 3 ribs, radius, ulna. I did get to set my own wrist after I noticed it was kinda bending the wrong way.
I went and bought the exact same car a week later - I figured it could have gone much worse