16 thoughts on “The Fastest Man-Made Object Ever”

1. Cool. What would atmospheric deceleration be in the few seconds it could act on it? I say it’s orbiting the sun today?

   1. It probably instantly vaporized from compression heating.

      1. Probably right, but being a disk wouldn’t it align on minimum cross section?

         1. It wouldn’t have time. It would be slammed into a refractory-material wall of air.

            1. We have a new [expensive] way to get rid of trash!

            2. So if it was made of ablative ceramic….reinforced and launched from the moon (from a similarly buried device sitting above a sealed tunnel pressurized to one atm….)

            3. Why would you need ablative material if launched from an airless world?

      2. If it vaporized, then it isn’t a single object. The fastest manmade object is probably New Horizons.

         1. Wasn’t the fastest “big thing” the Galileo entry probe at Jupiter? For a few moments, at least? It had to use Jupiter’s gravity well to achieve that, though. And before that may have been Ulysses during the Jupiter flyby.

2. This all sounds completely false.

   A light emitting diode chip is incontrovertibly “man made”.

   When you apply electricity, you get “man made” photons. They weren’t there previously … they were ‘made’ via the man-induced energy level fluctuations of the semiconductor innards.

   And if this seems like cheating, we can talk particle collisions at CERN.

3. Right. I heard the manhole cover story once before when I was reading about Project Prometheus i.e. nuclear pulse propulsion. I think I remember Dyson mentioning it on an interview once as well. It was used as a kind of prior proof that the concept would work. They additionally did some conventional chemical explosives powered pulsed propulsion demonstrator called “putt-putt” to show the avionics were doable.
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29#Operation_Plumbbob

   1. Different event. The book about project Orion talks about things that survived above ground nuclear blasts that got them started on Orion.

4. Is that one frame shot of the plate being “launched” available online anywhere?

5. I don’t believe this object could have made it to space, even if it had been accelerated to that speed (which I very seriously doubt it was).

   The mass/area (ballastic coefficient) of a 4″ plate of steel is 500 kg/m^2. The atmosphere (at sea level) is about 10,000 kg/m^2. The plate would have to ascend through 20 times it’s mass in air. Conservation of momentum says it should slow to below escape velocity, even if it experiences no ablation whatsoever.

   1. Ugh. “Its”, not “it’s”. I blame lack of coffee.

6. There is a rebuttal here. Essentially. No data.

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

   The focus was on containment of underground explosions. Thus the goal was the exact opposite of this event. Hence it wasn’t pursued. Would have been interesting though. I’m sure it would have fascinated Gerald Bull.

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