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But on October 16, 1957, just 12 days after Sputnik, the plan finally succeeded. Lofted to 54 miles aboard an Aerobee sounding rocket, the Penolite charges detonated, propelling two pellet-sized probes beyond the pull of Earth’s gravity and into space. Harvard’s Super-Schmidt Meteor Camera recorded the triumphant moment. “I am certain they escaped,” Zwicky rejoiced, “and are now circling a long ellipse, around the sun.”
During the Pascal-B nuclear test,[8] of August 1957, a 900-kilogram (2,000 lb) steel plate cap (a piece of armor plate) was welded over the borehole to contain the nuclear blast even though Brownlee predicted it would not work. When Pascal-B was detonated, the blast went straight up the test shaft, launching the cap into the atmosphere at a speed of more than 66 km/s (41 mi/s; 240,000 km/h; 150,000 mph). The plate was never found. Scientists believe compression heating caused the cap to vaporize as it sped through the atmosphere. A high-speed camera, which took one frame per millisecond, was focused on the borehole because studying the velocity of the plate was deemed scientifically interesting. After the detonation, the plate appeared in only one frame, but this was enough to make an estimation of its speed. Dr. Brownlee joked the best estimate of the cover's speed from the photographic evidence was it was "going like a bat!".[10] Brownlee estimated that the explosion, combined with the specific design of the shaft, could accelerate the plate to approximately six times Earth's escape velocity. Later calculations made during 2019 (although the result cannot be confirmed) are strongly in favor of vaporization.
originally posted by: zaderamsesholloway
It seems that to go fast in this universe, you follow the key notion of making planes smaller and more aerodynamic to go faster. If the Lockheed Blackbird is the peak of this process and can only go ~2,000mph, how does a less aerodynamic and bulky rocket ship go 25,000mph to achieve escape velocity without being destroyed by external forces?