After three years of planning, a missile on wheels designed to top 1,000 mph is finally under construction.
The team behind Bloodhound SSC hope to shatter the current land-speed record of 763.035 mph when it sends Royal Air Force pilot Andy Green streaking across a dry lake bed in South Africa within two years. The team is one of three hoping to exceed 800 mph.
Of the vehicles, the Bloodhound SSC is perhaps the most radical — which is saying something. The car, if it can be called that, features a jet engine and a rocket that produce 47,000 pounds of thrust. To put that in perspective, each of the Concorde’s four engines produced roughly 38,000 pounds at takeoff.
The British engineers designing the Bloodhound have signed off on the steel lattice chassis that will hold the wild ride’s drivetrain. Aerospace manufacturer Hampson Industries will build it.
“It’s a fantastic feeling to be handing over the drawings to the people who will now build the car,” chief engineer Mark Chapman told BBC. “It’s a ‘progressive definition release,’ which means as soon as we finish a design, it goes out the door. The first metal parts should start coming back to our design house in Bristol by Easter.”
The team unveiled a full-size mockup of Bloodhound last summer.Team leader Richard Noble announced this crazy idea more than two years ago. He and his crew unveiled a full-size mock-up of Bloodhound last summer at the Farnborough International Air Show near London.
Noble, who set a land speed record of his own in 1983, and his team are no strangers to this madness. He and Green set the current land speed record of 763.035 mph in 1997.
They continue a British tradition for speed that dates to the 1920s and ’30s, when Sir Malcolm Campbell set several records on land and sea. Britain has held the land speed record for 58 of the 112 years since Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat reached a blistering 39 mph outside Paris.
Traveling faster than a bullet is no easy feat. To do it, Bloodhound will use a Eurojet 2200 engine and a Falcon hybrid rocket. The idea is to use the jet to reach 350 mph and the rocket to go the rest of the way to 1,000 mph. Noble figures it should take 42 seconds to reach that velocity.
Bloodhound also will use an 800-horsepower V12 developed by Cosworth to start the jet, pump high-test peroxide into the rocket and power the hydraulic systems. (You can get the full technical rundown of the vehicle here.)
Aerodynamics are paramount at those speeds. Noble and chief aerodynamicist Ron Ayres spent three years designing the 42-foot–long vehicle. It will weigh 14,158 pounds fully fueled and ride on aluminum alloy wheels almost 3 feet in diameter. Lockheed Martin helped design them.
The team hopes to begin low-speed testing early next year before shipping Bloodhound to South Africa for flat-out runs in late 2012 or early 2013.
More than bragging rights are at stake here. Noble and Lord Drayson, a former minister of state for science and innovation, hope the project will inspire children to pursue careers in engineering, mathematics and science. More than 4,000 schools throughout Britain are following the project through the Bloodhound Education Programme.
Images: Bloodhound SSC. Video: BBC
