If This Is True, It's Awesome.

Sometimes a story pops up on the internet that seems beyond belief.  

Okay, that happens pretty much every day.

This is one of those stories, but a reporter at Business Insider has done some research that suggests it might actually be true.

A bit of information first.

The New Horizons spacecraft reached speeds of 36,373 MPH (58,536 KPH) on its journey to Pluto and is widely considered to be the fastest moving man-made object ever.

In the late 1940s, nuclear testing was done above ground, in the Nevada desert.  Nuts, but it happened.

By the 1950s, the concern over radiation in the atmosphere prompted the first underground nuclear tests.  Various depths and yields were tested for years this way.  By 1962 all testing in the U.S. was conducted underground.

Sputnik was launched on October 4, 1957 and was the first man-made satellite.  Turns out it may not have been the first man-made object to reach space, however...

Operation Plumbbob was one of those early underground tests and consisted of two explosions nicknamed "Pascal A" and "Pascal B" in 1957.  While earlier underground tests had simply buried the bomb and set it off, this one dug a shaft some 485 feet deep and only 3 feet in diameter.  The bomb was capped with an iron lid, like a manhole cover, about 4 inches thick.  

So, basically a gun with a coin shaped bullet.  They set Pascal A off on the night of July 26, 1957.

For that first test, they basically just pulled the trigger and plugged their ears.  Afterwords, one of the scientists got to wondering just how fast that iron cap had moved and so they set up Pascal B with the best camera they had and pulled that trigger again.

Despite a frame speed of one frame per millisecond, they only got one frame that captured an image of the lid.  It was enough to make an astonishing calculation.  The lid was moving at in incredible 125,000 MPH (201168 KPH)!  That's 3.4 times faster than New Horizons' recognized speed record and that's also 5 times the required velocity to escape the gravitational pull of the earth.

What's even more astounding is the probability that the lump of iron was moving so fast that it likely would not have burnt up in the atmosphere as it screamed upwards.  If it survived long enough to escape the atmosphere then it would have continued beyond the gravitational pull of the Earth itself.

If true, this means that a few months before the launch of the first man-made satellite, humans managed to launch two objects into space that may have travelled well beyond the low earth orbit that Sputnik managed.

What amazes me even more than the possibility of a pre-Sputnik space launch is that there's no huge push from the U.S. space community to have this verified and get all those history books revised...

The whole, fascinating story is here if you are interested.