The fastest, and my favorite, air-breathing aircraft ever built was 12 feet long, weighed about 3,300 pounds, had no pilot, and was designed to be used once and then left in the ocean. On November 16, 2004, NASA’s X-43A was dropped from a B-52 over the Pacific, boosted to speed by a Pegasus rocket, and lit a scramjet that carried it to Mach 9.64 at 110,000 feet. That is roughly 6,400 miles an hour, about three times the cruising speed of an SR-71 Blackbird. Twenty-two years later, nothing air-breathing has gone faster.
No comments:
Post a Comment