The Bloodhound is so fast, its creators needed to reinvent the wheel.
Officially dubbed the Bloodhound SSC -- short for supersonic car -- the pencil-shaped racer is meant to become the fastest car in the world and the first to reach 1,000 miles per hour -- faster than a speeding bullet. A car that fast doesn't just run on tires. It runs on 200-pound circles of aerospace aluminum that can absorb 50,000 times the force of gravity.
"We will have pushed back the boundaries of human endeavor," driver Andy Green, who flies fighter jets as a wing commander in the Royal Air Force in his spare time, told ABC News.
The car's statistics are mind-boggling. The engine is a combination rocket (designed by a 28-year-old self-trained rocketeer), race car engine and fighter jet afterburner that generates six times more power than all the cars in an Indy car race combined.
Individually, many pieces of the Bloodhound have appeared in race cars or missiles before. But the rocket is one-of-a-kind and the pieces have never been combined -- which is why the creators don't know what will happen when the engine is fired up for the first time in western England Wednesday.
read more: http://www.955klos.com/Article.asp?id=2545142&spid=24575
Officially dubbed the Bloodhound SSC -- short for supersonic car -- the pencil-shaped racer is meant to become the fastest car in the world and the first to reach 1,000 miles per hour -- faster than a speeding bullet. A car that fast doesn't just run on tires. It runs on 200-pound circles of aerospace aluminum that can absorb 50,000 times the force of gravity.
"We will have pushed back the boundaries of human endeavor," driver Andy Green, who flies fighter jets as a wing commander in the Royal Air Force in his spare time, told ABC News.
The car's statistics are mind-boggling. The engine is a combination rocket (designed by a 28-year-old self-trained rocketeer), race car engine and fighter jet afterburner that generates six times more power than all the cars in an Indy car race combined.
Individually, many pieces of the Bloodhound have appeared in race cars or missiles before. But the rocket is one-of-a-kind and the pieces have never been combined -- which is why the creators don't know what will happen when the engine is fired up for the first time in western England Wednesday.
read more: http://www.955klos.com/Article.asp?id=2545142&spid=24575