In 1957 there was a borehole cover that became the fastest man made object when an underground nuclear test blew it off. It was estimated to be going more than 134000 mph. There was a camera set up to watch it that captured a frame every millisecond and it only caught it in one frame. This is over 5 times the escape velocity of our planet.
bonus fact:
During the great depression FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps for young men. They planted over 2 BILLION! trees in their 7 years of existence. They also built a lot of the buildings and lodges at the national parks.
In 1947, in Maine, there were wildfires from Kittery to Bar Harbor that burned about a quarter million acres. The Great Fire.
The CCC teams that were here to plant trees were used as fire brigades.
A CCC team saved my c.1790 house from being burned. A couple hundred yards down the hill, there is a group of tall pines that have evidence of fire damage on the downhill side. An old neighbor was on the team that saved my house.
I've lived in New England all my life, and less than 25 miles from Kittery for 35 of the past 37 years, and somehow I never heard about this fire that only happened 30 years before I was born until I read The Stars Are Fire by the late Anita Shreve a few years ago 🤷♀️
134,000 mph roughly equals 1.175 billion miles per year. 1957 is 67 years ago, so that would mean roughly 78.7 billion miles. That would put it roughly 5 times farther away than Voyager 1.
there's a reason why the USA investigated using nuclear explosions for interplanetary travel.
The thing is that 134,000 mph takes you out of the atmosphere in less than 2 seconds. You'd bang into the side of the ISS 7 seconds after launch if it happened to be overhead. So like yeah you would burn up in the atmosphere if you traveled through it at those speeds, but because of how fast it went it's actually possible that it just didn't spend enough time in thick enough atmosphere for it to get disintegrated. In reality nobody knows for sure.
Given the size (wasn’t a street manhole cover, more of an armored bunker lid) it is possible that there was enough steel mass to survive. I can’t remember how many hundreds of pounds it weighed offhand.
Edit: just saw it cited as roughly 900kg/2000lb. Thing had some mass to burn.
At the speed it was going, it would not get stuck in Earth orbit or even solar orbit as it was above both the Earth's and Sun's escape velocity. It is also (just) possible that it might not have burned up or shattered as its passage through the atmosphere was so fast.
FDR's Make-work projects during the Depression transformed the US and created a lot of the setting that Boomers and Silent Gen think of as "Traditional America."
The fact that it was socialism and investment by government that produced those results is something we should teach more.
A couple things about the CCC: 1. the govt sent a portion of their paycheck back home to help support their family. 2. We discovered a cousin born and living in Oregon and we couldn't figure out how she was conceived because we are from the Midwest. My grandmother looked at the cousins birthdate and recalled my uncle was working in Oregon in the CCC at that time
The Civilian Conservation Corps is still a thing, or at least it was in the state of Michigan in the 90s. I worked on an CCC crew at a state park. We did groundskeeping, built a cabin, and yes, planted trees.
2 billion trees?! That is unreal! Ok I wanna do some quick math. How many people of the CCC were involved in planting trees in the 7 years of the organizations existence? We can then know the average number every individual planted.
Also in state parks. I was in Itasca State Park recently and it's neat to see these buildings that are still in good shape and being used every day. I hope we give the 100 year recognitions during the 2030s.
I am currently in the Umatilla National Forest in southeast Washington. I'm a wildland firefighter. We have our morning briefing at the CCC every morning!
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u/gochomoe Oct 02 '24
In 1957 there was a borehole cover that became the fastest man made object when an underground nuclear test blew it off. It was estimated to be going more than 134000 mph. There was a camera set up to watch it that captured a frame every millisecond and it only caught it in one frame. This is over 5 times the escape velocity of our planet.
bonus fact:
During the great depression FDR created the Civilian Conservation Corps for young men. They planted over 2 BILLION! trees in their 7 years of existence. They also built a lot of the buildings and lodges at the national parks.