Waverider On The Loose

Until the advent of the steam engine the speed of man relied on our own muscles or those of a saddled horse. That barrier has been successively broken by trains, cars, planes, and rockets with the aim of getting someone somewhere somehow faster than before and yesterday the Pentagon launched the X-51 Waverider from a B-52 bomber over the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. Previous missions have ended in failure and Boeing has been slow to announce the test results, however at a speed of Mach 6 or 4300 MPH the Waverider could cut travel between New York and London to less than an hour. Previously NASA had achieved Mach 9.6 or 7000 miles per hour with the X-43, but the Pentagon is more interested in the military uses of the Waverider as a hypersonic cruise missile, since the cost of reaching that speed is astronomical, unless you're a billionaire or the Pentagon. For the rest of us it's subsonic on a 747. And I'm happy with that, since those hours aloft are spent without any interference from the rest of the world and that peace and quiet is a rarity these days.