Bloodhound goes bang

I think people have ‘better’ things to do with their time and money these days. In a world where most people get off on following the dreams of the few lucky ones on TV, blogs etc, does breaking the sound barrier in a car really cut it anymore? Isn’t that why we have aircraft?

The other thing is, what useful technical benefits can come from it. Apparently lots of innovations came out of the space race. Business investment must be justified I guess.

I think for anything like this to succeed, you need to capture everyone’s imagination. To be honest, I’d never heard of this project, maybe they need to market the idea better. There is so much ‘stuff’ out there these days, it’s difficult to compete for everyone’s time and money.

Maybe Branson will take it on?

Can't see Branson or the wealthy gutrot producing Austrian putting any money in it.

Trouble is Bloodhound was probably always destined to fail.

The technological advancements  it could achieve are limited only to that goal - going +Mach 1, sure the efforts to understand and control the unknown aerodynamic forces on a land vehicle at those speeds must be a hard one to solve, but after that there wasn’t much else to be had - Rocket and Jet technology has been understood and improved incrementally over the last 8 decades, the Bloodhound team were relying on RR for that expertise anyway.
Materials advancement? Nope, that’s all being done in the privateer space race - a much more sensible way to spunk vast sums of cash.

We can never have wheeled vehicles running on the public road at the pace bloodhound was being designed and built to achieve so worthless from that viewpoint too.

Much as it pains me to say it Land speed records are a relic of a past age - an age which probably peaked with Craig Breedlove’s Spirit of America. At least then there was some competition for the LSR.
For the last 35+ years it’s been a vanity project for one man - not taking away Nobles achievements with Thrust and ThrustSSC, but you do have to ask why nobody else is taking up the challenge/ -the answer to which lies most likely in the fact we live in the age of the Snowflake environmentalists- the idea of burning lots of fuel to go quickly over two runs must seem utterly criminal to the twats that think low powered hoovers, low energy lamps and EV’s are the answer.

Once upon a time it WAS important as it helped advance technological achievement.

Less obvious that is the case now - especially when you consider we have achieved so much in the last 50 or so years.

Post ThrustSSC it certainly did look like a vanity project- there is an argument it’s helped promote Science, Maths, Engineering and Technology- Bloodhound had a commitment to encouraging tomorrow’s engineers, scientist, mathematician and IT weirdos through its SMET programme - so when all is said and done they have gone as quick as a modern high end car and ignited a passion for SMET in a few school kids, not a great way to achieve those goals.

Bargain

Have you got a drive long enough to park it at your new pad?