Word: mach
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...into the sky. At 31 km, more than double civil aviation altitude, a black, windowless, pilotless sliver of finned metal shaped like a flattened dart will separate from the Pegasus' nose and scream down into the ocean. NASA estimates the X-43 will reach a cruising speed of Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound, or 2 km per second, in the few moments before it hits water. By August 2002, nasa wants to be at Mach 10. Then it'll start thinking about runways and cutting flying time from Tokyo to New York to less than an hour...
...scramjet?as different from a jet engine as a rocket was from the steam engine?and this will be its first flight. If all goes to plan, it should smash every world airplane record. It will make the fastest aircraft, the rocket-powered X-15 (Mach 6.7), look turgid, and leave the fastest jet, the SR-71 Blackbird (Mach 3.2), in its stratospheric dust. Says Vince Rausch, director of the Hyper-X project: "It's the future. We're convinced of that. What we've not done yet is demonstrate to the people it's real. And that's what...
Scramjet is short for supersonic combustion ramjet. It uses the rush of air at high speed to ignite fuel and produce thrust, rather than relying on compressed air from a jet engine's fan blades. As well as being capable of hypersonic speeds (greater than Mach 4), scramjets get their oxygen from the air rather than tanks (as rockets do), reducing cost and freeing up space for cargo or passengers. They are also currently environmentally friendly: all three models under test run on pollution-free hydrogen...
Deep in the heart of high-tech, Mach-speed America lies a lovely, leafy spot where more than 10,000 people gather every summer to enjoy a leisurely, decidedly low-tech form of entertainment: the ancient art of storytelling. Dr. Stuart King is one of them. Eight years ago, the busy physician was reluctant to "give up" two whole days to accompany his wife and kids to the festival. But after listening to his first storyteller, he was hooked. Now his office staff knows not to make appointments for him during the annual event, which takes place at the foot...
...Cast a wide net, scrabble up and down from period to period, a scale intimate like Proust's madeleine and yet grand and popular. How did people do this before? Should I Mach Three today, or go for a barbershop shave with strop and blade? Send someone a letter, or an e-mail? Do I touch-type it up, or take out the typewriter, and probably wrangle with the ribbon far less than I'd sweat blood over a smug squat printer? But, no, it isn't just efficiency, isn't it the pre-modern satisfaction of unfamiliar physical immediacy...