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That shattered the official record for manned flight that had stood since 1967, when Major William J. Pete Knight took his X-15A-2 to Mach 6.7. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Pete.
Knights flight had been very different. For starters, Knights X-15 dropped from the bottom of a B-52 bomber, while Lindemans HTV-6Xb took off under its own power from a military airbase at Groom Lake, Nevada. Knights X-15 was basically a rocket with wings and a c.o.c.kpit.
Lindemans plane used fairly standard turbojets for takeoff and landing, combined with scramjets to hit such obscene speeds. The most important difference? Knights plane was built for speed only. It couldnt fight.
The HTV-6Xb was a bona fide war machine.
Known by its nickname, the Wasp, the HTV-6Xb was the worlds premier air-superiority weapon. The world didnt know of its existence, of course, but that didnt change the fact it could eat a couple of M16s for breakfast, wash them down with the best Mirage the French had to offer and then casually pick its teeth with an F-22 Raptor. The Wasp could reach any target zone faster than anything on the planet and outfly anything it found in that airs.p.a.ce.
This particular combat mission didnt require a great deal of skill. Lindeman had taken off on a northwest heading, flown to ten thousand feet, then came around in a slow turn that pointed his nose toward South Bend, Indiana. The conventional jet-turbine engines drove the Wasp to Mach 2. At that speed, the turbines air inlets closed off, forcing that same air intake into the scramjet engines. The turbines had to shut off, because once the plane reached Mach 3 or so, air friction would melt the spinning intake fans. The scramjet portion, however, acted more like a funnelit had no moving parts. Air shot in at supersonic speeds, compressed, mixed with a gaseous fuel and ignited in a highly controlled reaction that drove the plane to Mach 10.
Lindemans record-breaking flight would take him from Groom Lake to South Bend in fifteen minutes. Almost seventeen hundred miles. In fifteen minutes.
Twelve minutes into the flight, Lindeman released an ASM-157 antisatellite missile. His speed of Mach 10 wasnt even half that of the ASM-157, which would max out at Mach 22.7fifteen thousand miles per hour.
Aircraft normally come nowhere near Mach 5, let alone Mach 10. As a result, anyone or anything watching the skies for unusual flight patterns would notice the Wasp. Hard to miss something like that.
Which was precisely the point.
There was no way the Orbital could track every plane in North America. It couldnt even track all the military planes in that areafar too much traffic to monitor. It did, however, try to keep tabs on particular military bases. So when the HTV-6Xb took off from Groom Lake, the Orbital noted the flight and marked a subroutine to watch its direction.
When the HTV-6Xb turned and accelerated to Mach 1, that didnt merit the Orbitals primary attention. At Mach 2 the Orbital changed the marking status to potential threat. By the time it hit Mach 5 and was flying straight for South Bend, the Orbital knew it was under attack. When the jet launched a missile, it was only 350 miles away.
At Mach 22, traveling 350 milesthe distance from San Francisco to Los Angelestakes just under a minute and a half.