I saw this video yesterday. It’s a hypersonic rocket sled going at 6,599 miles per hour. It’s going at 6,599 miles per hour because it’s in America. If it was anywhere else, it would be going at 10,620 kilometres per hour.
That’s 2,950 metres per second: just under 3 kilometres in the time it takes you to read
these three words.
Stick your sound on, don’t blink (really, you’ll miss it) and just watch this.
For the record, this is about Mach 8.6 at the Holloman High Speed (yes) Test Track near Alamogordo in New Mexico.
More information here.
It seems incredible because it is, so just to put it in some sort of context, the current land speed record is 763.035 mph or 1,227.985 kph (Mach 1.016) – more than 8 times slower than this.
But without all that pesky air resistance and with plenty of (literal) space, the International Space Station manages 7.66km/s or 27,576 kilometres per hour.
Suddenly, this doesn’t seem quite so nippy, hey?
One day, we’ll all be travelling at hypersonic speeds, of course.
But not today, because it’s cold and wet and I want to stay indoors, thank you very much.