Mach 8.6 hypersonic sled - video

[WmRMeyers]

What happened?

A sled moving at about 9400 feet per second moved past the camera. That's cooking right along there! That is pretty close to ten times as fast as the bullet from a .45 Automatic pistol moves. If you can hit your target with a missile that fast, you don't need a warhead on the missile. I did OTD&E work on the GBU-15 back in the late 70's. We were tossing them down a sled track at about a thousand feet per second. They would punch right through a 13' cube of reinforced concrete, and weren't moving nearly as fast as the projectile in the video.

Bill