With the advancement of science and technology, humanity has created numerous objects that travel at astonishing speeds. Here are the 7 fastest artificial objects recorded in human history.
7. NASA X-43 (11,265 km/h)
The X-43 is the fastest aircraft ever built. This unmanned aircraft was designed to test supersonic air-breathing engine technology at speeds exceeding Mach 5 (approximately 6,170 km/h). However, this type of aircraft is believed to be capable of reaching speeds up to Mach 10.
6. Spacecraft (28,160 km/h)
With auxiliary fuel tanks containing nearly 2 million liters of liquid oxygen and hydrogen mixture and three massive main engines, spacecraft can achieve speeds of approximately 28,160 km/h while maintaining low Earth orbit.
5. Apollo 10 Command Module (39,900 km/h)
The Apollo 10 mission in May 1969 witnessed the fastest crewed spacecraft in history. Apollo 10 was the final test flight, simulating critical scenarios necessary for the success of the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first humans on the moon.
4. Stardust Probe (46,440 km/h)
Designed to collect samples from comets, the Stardust probe naturally has an extremely high speed, reaching Mach 36 – the fastest recorded speed of any artificial object re-entering the atmosphere.
3. Voyager 1 (62,136 km/h)
Launched by NASA in 1977, Voyager 1 is the farthest man-made object from Earth. By 2013, Voyager 1 had entered interstellar space. It is known that this spacecraft travels over 500 million km per year.
2. An Iron Manhole Cover (201,168 km/h)
In a nuclear bomb test underground in 1957, American scientists accidentally “shot” a 10 cm thick, nearly 227 kg iron manhole cover into the air. Even more astonishing, the high-speed camera used in the experiment – capable of capturing one frame per millisecond – could only capture one frame containing the manhole cover. Dr. Robert Brownlee, who designed the experiment, stated that it is difficult to know what happened to the manhole cover. However, he speculated that it may have reached a speed six times greater than the speed required to overcome Earth’s gravity (which is 70 km/s).
So, what was the speed of the manhole cover at that moment?
This is a datum that everyone is curious about, including the researchers involved in the experiment.
However, when the researchers played back the images captured by the high-speed camera, they did not see the manhole cover flying away; it seemed to have disappeared into the air.
After careful discussion and analysis, the researchers decided to slow down the playback speed, but at that point, they found that the high-speed camera only captured one frame of the manhole cover.
Based on the camera’s capture speed and the moment the manhole cover appeared on screen, the researchers calculated that the speed of the manhole cover was approximately 252,000 km/h, equivalent to 70 km/s, which is faster than “Apollo 2”.
A speed of 70 km/s exceeds the third cosmic velocity (16.7 km/s) needed to escape the Sun’s gravitational pull. At such maximum speed, theoretically, it could easily fly out of the Solar System and venture into the depths of space.
However, could it actually fly out of the Solar System?
The answer given by most scientists is that this manhole cover might not have even left Earth.
Because after the manhole cover shot up from the ground, it would experience intense friction with the dense atmosphere, generating heat that would melt the manhole cover and reduce it to ash.
1. Helios Probe (252,792 km/h)
Designed in the 1970s to study the Sun, the two Helios satellites (1 and 2) broke all speed records known to humanity. It is reported that Helios 1 took only 2 years to get closer to the Sun than Mercury.
