Friday, May 26, 2023

An interesting comparison

 

Red Side has produced a fascinating video comparison of the fastest man-made objects (so far).  It's quite entertaining.




I was amused by its reference to an ultra-high-speed manhole cover, launched during Operation Plumbbob in 1957.  It wasn't actually a manhole cover, but a 2,000 pound steel cover plate over a 500 foot borehole used for a nuclear test explosion.  It's presumed to have been vaporized during its passage through the Earth's atmosphere after the big bang.

Peter


7 comments:

Old NFO said...

That's a good one, and yes, the manhole cover is hilarious!

Mad Jack said...

That's a great post, but the manhole cover puts it over the top.

Anonymous said...

I like to think that, if extraterrestrials exist, somewhere two of them are peering around the edges of a perfectly circular hole through their space station, wondering what happened.

Beans said...

Interesting how many were created in the United States.

Trafficus said...

From memory the manhole cover can be see in a photo from the blast. Would be epic to be able to produce the photo (which now I can't remember if I saw it or not), but not today.

Peter said...

See the comments of the scientist who supervised the "manhole cover" test:

https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Tests/Brownlee.html

I think he had a blast!

Philip Sells said...

It was an okay video, I thought, but I didn't enjoy the reverse playback toward the end. That second helicopter they mentioned looks groovy.