Well not really, but we are close. If you were to go into orbit, you could circle the Earth in about 90 minutes like the astronauts have already done. It is truly amazing when you think of the progress that man has made in transportation. When man first started to travel, he walked or maybe ran. He never really went too far from his home. Even when man spread to other continents, that took thousands of years and it was probably more like individuals just each going a little further to get to be able to hunt without others being on top of them. In fact man may never have even set out to spread all over the world, It just might have happened so slowly that he didn't even notice it. I don't think that anyone said, "hey lets move to China or I hear that America is a nice place to live". People in ancient times were always looking for easier food. Maybe they followed roaming herds of animals or found better berries a little further out. The fact is that in the very early years most people lived and died within a few miles of where they were born. Somewhere along the way, man learned to ride a horse. Most of us tend to think that this, along with the occasional elephant are the only animals he rode, but we don't know that for sure. There are not too many carving around showing him riding much else except for oxen, but maybe he tried something else first and it just didn't work out. Can you imagine a man trying to climb on the back of a Rhino or Hippo or some such animal?

Anyway, once man learned how to ride horses, he was able to travel further and faster Many experts agree that a horse can travel about 25 miles per day without ill effects, but a strong healthy horse might make 100 miles once in a while, but that is not good for the horse. Horses were prized animals and represented wealth. I don't think that anyone, unless it was a dire emergency, would have pushed their horse that far. So it is safe to say that people could now travel about 25 miles in a day. Actually the main difference between walking and riding was speed. A person could walk the same 25 miles but it would take him about 6.25 hours if he walked non stop at 4 mph. while a horse, a professional race horse runs at about 38 mph, but horses can't keep this speed up for long, so you have to figure that if a person made 30 miles in a day, that was considered outstanding. Too bad that we weren't able to tame a cheetah. Riding animals continued right up to the invention of the railroad and even after. The steam engine was a real breakthrough. The idea of rails came from the Germans who used wooden rails as early as 1550. Horse drawn wagons would move on the wooden rails easier than they did on the ground. By the late 1700s the wooden rails had become metal and the cart wheels became flanged, like train wheels. An inventor looking the situation over decided to try and make a steam engine to replace the horse, after all everything else was there, which was the rails and the correct wheels. The first locomotive with a steam engine was run in 1804 and pulled 10 tons of iron, 70 men and 5 wagons for 9 miles. The trip took about 2 hours, but when you consider the fact that you could travel 24 hours a day, not counting breakdowns, at 4.5 miles per hour, you could now cover 108 miles a day. Man was now able to travel anywhere from 3 to 5 times as far in one day. By the late 1800s trains were going at about 65 miles per hour, which meant that a man could travel 1500 miles plus in a day not allowing for stops..

Enter the automobile. Was this an improvement in speed and distance? Well really not. When the automobile was introduced it was extremely slow and prone to breakdowns. I am not talking about historical automobiles from the 1300s like the one built by Guido da Vigevano in 1335 or a steam powered one that was said to have been built in 1678. You notice that this was before we had the first recorded steam engine. No I am talking about the late 1800s and early 1900s. The automobiles were either powered by steam, gasoline or electric. A man could run faster than some of those. In some places they had laws that said that a man with a red lantern had to walk in front of the vehicle when it was moving. Wow if this didn't severely limit your speed, I don't know what would. Even as cars got faster they were not as fast as some trains. Today you can actually buy cars, if you have enough money, that can exceed 200 mph, but unfortunately or maybe fortunately, there are no roads in this country where you are allowed to travel at that speed for the most part. While the automobile wasn't generally a device that gave us an increase in speed, it never the less was able to get us to many destinations a lot faster than the train. It didn't have to stop to let people on and off and it could go directly to its destination, unlike trains where you had to figure out how to get from a station to where you were going. So in some respects, the automobile was able to shorten your travel time.

Not long after the first few modern automobiles came out, the Wright Brothers flew, what most called, the first airplane. I say "what most called" , because there is some doubt in this area that it was the first powered flight, but most believe it to be. The first flight took place in 1904 and lasted more than 5 minutes. It wasn't until 1909 that the U.S. government bought their first airplane from the Wright Brothers. It cost $25,000 and could fly faster than 40 mph. The Wright Brothers decided to try passenger flights and in 1908 a passenger died during a crash. From this point on, planes just kept increasing in speed and soon were the fastest way to travel. By the mid 1920s reliable passenger service was available. The Ford TriMotor aircraft was all metal and the later models could accommodate 40 passengers, had a smoking room and two toilets. The maximum speed was about 150 mph and the cruising speed about 90 mph. A far cry from the Wright Flyer. These planes had a range of about 550 miles. So that there isn't confusion here, these are general figures since there were a few different models of the TriMotors built over the years. Man could now cover a maximum distance of 600 miles in only 4 hours. This was a tremendous breakthrough in travel. It really took about 5.5 hours since cruising speed was usually the speed the plane flew at. By the time of World War II, the Corsair F4U had a top speed of 446 mph.

Before the war ended, the Germans introduced jet planes and those first jets were capable of a speed of 542 mph which later increased. In 1969 a revolutionary passenger jet entered the aviation scene, it was called the Concord. The Concord was a British and French project that to this day was the fastest passenger jet ever flown. It was capable of speeds of over twice the speed of sound and had a range of 3,900 miles. Here was a plane that could get you there fast, really fast. The speed of sound is not a constant, but it is generally thought of at about 700 to 762 mph. Using these figures, the common man could travel 3,900 miles in about 5.2 hours. That is quite a leap. That would have been the ideal speed, but the plane was hampered by other things, including very high ticket prices and noise. Every time the plane broke the sound barrier over land, it could be heard for miles and could even shatter windows, so this type of flight was prohibited over land masses, limiting the planes usefulness. The plane was expensive to fly and the company responsible for flying it, just bled money and they did it for the 27 years that the planes flew. The fastest plane to ever fly is said to be the SR-71 or Blackbird, originally a military and CIA aircraft. It first flew in 1964. A total of 32 were built and it is said that 12 of them were destroyed in accidents. The plane still holds many of the world's speed records even though it has been out of service for years. This plane was said to be capable of well in excess of 2,000 mph. It is cited as being able to travel at Mach 3.2+. Mach is the variable speed of sound. The plus could indicate anything more. For all we know it might have been able to travel at Mach 4.

X-43A With Scramjet Engine
Photo Source: NASA

Well this bring us to the near future. and the hypersonic age. Yes we are entering the hypersonic age right now. Oh maybe I had better explain what I am talking about. There is a jet engine that is called a scramjet. It is an engine that requires air rushing through it at several times the speed of sound before it can operate, but when it does, it will propel an aircraft at speed of at least Mach 6 or six times the speed of sound and many engineers believe that it can go even much faster and maybe hit Mach 15.that is over 11,000 mph. We have been experimenting with these engines for almost 50 years and have reached the point where we are about to put one into an aircraft. One of the big challenges was to make sure your plane didn't melt at those speeds, but it is said that we have finally overcome this. Another challenge was how to keep the flame lit in the engine when wind was rushing in at these terrific speeds. We demonstrated that we could do this with the flight of the X-43A when it hit speeds of Mach 9.6. Currently we are experimenting with an unmanned vehicle know as Blackswift. The project is being run by DARPA, ThE Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It is hoped that the unmanned plane will debut in 2012 and be followed by a commercial plane. At this point man will be able to travel to the furthest point of the Earth from his location in about 2.5 hours. Now that is speed folks.