Next land-speed record on the horizon? Teams chase quadruple digits

We're at it again America, that great crusade to best our brethren from the British Isles.

But this time, we do so through speed, raw rocket-powered speed.

Richard Noble of guess where, has been developing a rocket with wheels that instead of traveling up into the atmosphere, shall travel parallel with the ground in an attempt to top the current land-speed record (which Noble set at 763 mph in 1997) by breaching 1,000 mph (1609 kph) with his latest machine, the Bloodhound Project built from the ground up.

On our side of the great pond, Ed Shadle and Team North American Eagle have taken a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter (Cold War era fighter pictured above) and converted the interceptor into a drag racer.  So far the former fighter has propelled past 400 mph, a modest climb north to their goal of 800 mph.  The reason, data data data.

For a land vehicle to travel at 800 mph it must do one thing all supersonic jets do, break through the sound barrier.  Granted this doesn't seem to hard right?  But you have to take in the physics of a barrier breach before you break through it, to not could cost you your life.

At subsonic speeds, bodies in motion project sound waves in front of their direction of travel.  These waves force air molecules to move releasing the possibility of pressure building up from too much matter being forced into such small of space.  However, once bodies in motion reach the speed of sound, they catch up to these sound waves.  Once that occurs the pressure within that space builds to a breaking point.  And once the body breaks the speed of sound, the barrier of pressure that had built up erupts with a sonic boom.  This eruption is not simply noise, those waves are physical and tangible, thus under that amount of pressure they could also shake the vehicle apart.

Which is why Shadle and TNAE have taken their time to top the land-speed record by July 4, 2010.

Lots of tests need to be conducted and finalized before they attempt to break the sound barrier.  They must know the Starfighter can hold it's own on the ground, like it did in the air.

For Noble, he's thrown the Bloodhound (shown above) into the wind-tunnel to shake the dog to it's bones.  But the question on each designer's mind is, how will the supersonic interaction with the ground effect the vehicle's underside.  If that sonic boom erupts in a sphere, will the down force push the vehicle upward slightly?  Like a kid doing a bunny-hop jump on his bike?  No one knows, and there is only one way to properly find out, shoot for the moon.  But for Noble, he'll keep science as his six-shooter, although the wind tunnel is insufficient to test these effects explained above, he's gone to supercomputer computations of fluid dynamics to simulate the pressures his Bloodhound will have to endure.  So far, the computers have estimated at 1,000 mph, 12 tons of air pressure will squeeze in on every inch of the vehicle.