Team leader Andy Green holds a
model of the Bloodhound SSC. All going well, the supersonic car will
attempt to reach 1000mph in South Africa in 2016.
HIDE CAPTION
Made of titanium, carbon
fiber and, like superman, is designed to go faster than a speeding
bullet, the Bloodhound SSC has been painstakingly put together and
tested over the better part of six years.
In 2016, the UK-based
team plan to take the 42-foot (8.9m) vehicle to Hakskeen Pan, a dry lake
bed in South Africa, for a crack at the record breaking attempt.
Former fighter jet pilot
Royal Air Force (RAF) Wing Commander Andy Green said even designing a
car that can hold together at these blistering speeds has been a triumph
of the engineer's art.
"No rubber," he told CNN
from The Bloodhound Project headquarters in Bristol, UK. "Beyond about
450mph it's really, really hard to keep a tire on - they just get flung
off. So we have solid aluminum.
"We've been through a
huge evolution of finding something that's tough enough that would do
the job. Basically this car goes faster than a speeding bullet, so
anything that hits this is like being shot at from a gun."
The former jet ace, who
has flown combat missions over Iraq, Bosnia and Afghanistan, can lay
claim to be the only man to have broken the sound barrier in the air and
on land. In 1997, he hit 763 mph or Mach 1 in the vehicle ThrustSSC to
become the first man to break the sound barrier on land.
The Bloodhound Project
takes the land speed record a step further in a car that is part jet
fighter, part Formula 1 racer and part space rocket.
"A thousand miles an hour
at ground level is faster than any jet fighter has ever traveled in
history, so there are going to be some major challenges," Green said.
Besides three engines
delivering 135,000 horsepower, the Bloodhound is equipped with rocket
boosters to deliver the thrust necessary to get it to 1,000 mph.
"(The jet engines) on
their own will take us to 600mph or thereabouts, but to get a land speed
record, at about 350 miles an hour we turn on a rocket engine to take
us all the way through to a 1000mph," said lead designer Mark Chapman.
"The rocket is the key -- that's the difference between 750 mph and
1,000 mph."
The Bloodhound team
scoured the globe to find a desert run that could accommodate a vehicle
which, at 1,000 mph, is likely to run out of road in a matter of
seconds. The requirements were a perfectly flat landscape, at least 12
miles long and two miles wide.
They eventually selected
Hakskeen Pan, in Northern Cape, South Africa where Bloodhound SSC will
cover a mile in 3.6 seconds -- equivalent to 4.5 football pitches laid
end to end every second.
Having already set the
land speed record, Green is in a good place to describe what it is like
in the cockpit of the world's fastest cars. Even so, the new challenges
presented by Bloodhound SSC sometimes leave him lost for words.
"The best single
description I've ever heard was from the late, great Art Arfons who set
three world records in the 1960s and got up to almost 600 mph.
It's hugely busy, it's very hot, it's very noisy. Apart from all those things, it should be fairly simple
Andy Green
Andy Green
"Somebody asked him one
day what it was like and he said: 'What is it like to drive a land-speed
(record)? To drive a jet car to do 600 miles an hour over the ground?
"And he said: 'It's a
bit like the taste of chocolate. If you've never had a bar of chocolate I
am really going to struggle to explain what it is like'."
Ultimately, he said, the cockpit is place of tremendous G forces, heat and vibration.
"In a land-speed car,
that's just a normal day in the office. Uncomfortable, but that's what
it's like. It's hugely busy, it's very hot, it's very noisy. Apart from
all those things, it should be fairly simple."
While the aim of the
project is to crack the magic 1,000 mph mark (the closest yet has been
an American F104 jet fighter which flew just above ground level at
988mph), Green said the ultimately the record attempt is about
instilling a sense of engineering progress in future generations.
"This about developing
technology. This is about finding out new things. This is about
exploring," he said. "And the story of engineering exploration is about
the failures and the challenges, not just about the successes."
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