This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of employ.

NASA X-43A Air Force

The beginning of Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff is practically a love letter to Chuck Yeager. The excellent movie version features a sequence depicting Yeager as he test pilots the Ten-i aircraft. Flight out of what would become Edwards AFB in California, Yeager became the first person to engage in supersonic flying.

Now, a few decades after and with little prelude, NASA's Armstrong Flight Enquiry Eye in Edwards, California has been uploading hundreds of videos from decades of bleeding-edge helmsmanship research onto YouTube. AFRC is posting its legacy video footage and then everyone can watch — including video of the X-1 in activeness. So footstep into your test pilot boots, kiddos, because we're going supersonic.

The AFRC is putting a great deal of video content "front and center" on its website and YouTube channel, to get it out of the archives and onto your glowing rectangles. It's the AFRC'southward video vault: some of the nearly important missions the center has ever conducted. Not every flight is supersonic, but they're all pretty absurd. Footage uploaded so far includes examination flights of the X-one, the Ten-15, and the X-43A. They've got videos of STS-1, the get-go Space Shuttle mission, along with Endeavour, Discovery, and Atlantis. More than stuff pops up on their channel every time y'all look abroad.

Amidst the highlights is this prune on the capabilities of NASA's Global Hawk UAV. The Global Hawk is a fractional replacement for the venerable Lockheed U-2, and can carry out many of the same missions and gather much of the aforementioned data, all without e'er putting a airplane pilot at risk:

Then there'due south peppy compilation showing off the hypersonic 10-43A. The X-43A notwithstanding holds the tape for the fastest shipping on tape — it dropped from a B-52 upon launch and then ignited its Pegasus rocket booster. There were three tests in total. The outset 1 failed, but during its its second test flight, it managed to travel 24km in just 11 seconds. That works out to roughly Mach half-dozen.83. In the third test, the Ten-43A managed to travel even faster, reaching approximately Mach 9.6.

Considering these videos were buried in a digital database at ane detail NASA library, they weren't getting much air. But YouTube is the largest single video database in the earth, and it's all searchable past keyword.

"NASA has so much digital content that tends to be overlooked by the public, given the difficulty that exists in actually locating the content," Rebecca Richardson, social media managing director for NASA Armstrong, told Motherboard in an email. "Our promise is that by moving the content to more accessible platforms, NASA fans and media personnel will exist able to access the content more regularly and become more fully immersed in what is happening at NASA."