The Fastest Human-Made Object Is a Manhole Cover Shot Into Space


When I first saw this story on an old Quora thread, I didn’t believe it.

person in sandals walks by manhole cover that says Berkeley

Pedestrians walk past a manhole cover that wasn’t shot into space in Berkeley, California, on July 18, 2019.

AP/Jeff Chiu


How could an iron manhole cover be the fastest human-made object ever launched?

I honestly pictured something akin to the exploding manhole covers that terrify NYC residents:

It wasn’t like that. This manhole cover was shot into space with a nuclear bomb.

Robert Brownlee, an astrophysicist who designed the nuclear test in question, told Insider the unbelievable story in 2016, before he died at the age of 94 in 2018.

Brownlee refuted the non-believers and asserted that yes, it likely was the fastest object that humankind ever launched.

Here’s how Brownlee says history was made.

But the very first underground nuclear tests were a bit of an experiment — nobody knew exactly what might happen.

nuclear bomb mushroom cloud from the uncle test in Operation Jangle

The mushroom cloud from the Uncle test at the Nevada Test Site on November 29, 1951, reached 11,500 feet.


Department of Energy


The first one, nicknamed “Uncle,” exploded beneath the Nevada Test Site on November 29, 1951.

Uncle was a code for “underground.”

It was only buried 17 feet, but the top of the bomb’s mushroom cloud exploded 11,500 feet into the sky.

The underground nuclear tests we’re interested in were nicknamed “Pascal,” during Operation Plumbbob in 1957.

a document that says operation plumbbob at the top and two tests highlighted: pascal a and pascal b

Sadly, no images are left from the Pascal experiments. All that’s left are government documents like this one.


NNSA


Brownlee said he designed the Pascal-A test as the first that aimed to contain nuclear fallout. The bomb was placed at the bottom of a hollow column — 3 feet wide and 485 feet deep — with a 4-inch-thick iron cap on top.

The test was conducted on the night of July 26, 1957, so the explosion coming out of the column looked like a Roman candle.

Brownlee said the iron cap in Pascal-A exploded off the top of the tube “like a bat much hotter than hell.”

Brownlee wanted to measure how fast the iron cap flew off the column, so he designed a second experiment, Pascal-B, and got an incredible calculation.

a man in a button down shirt and tie sits in a control room during operation plumbob

Herbert Grier, director of timing and firing, seated at the firing console in control room during an Operation Plumbbob test.


NNSA


Brownlee replicated the first experiment, but the column in Pascal-B was deeper at 500 feet. They also recorded the experiment with a camera that shot one frame per millisecond.

On August 27, 1957, the “manhole cover” cap flew off the column with the force of the nuclear explosion. The iron cover was only partially visible in one frame, Brownlee said.

When he used this information to find out how fast the cap was going, Brownlee calculated it was traveling at five times the escape velocity of the Earth — or about 125,000 miles per hour.

“The pressure at the top of that pipe was enormous,” he told Insider in 2016. “The first thing that you get is a flash of light coming from the device at the bottom of the empty pipe, and that flash is tremendously hot. That flash that comes is more than 1 million times brighter than the sun. So for it to blow off was, if I may say so, inevitable.”

Mere months after the Pascal tests, October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite. While the USSR was the first to launch a satellite, Brownlee was probably the first to launch an object into space.

a black and white photo shows a man in a lab coat in front of the sputnik satellite

On Oct. 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 successfully launched and entered Earth’s orbit.

NASA/Asif A. Siddiqi


Since it was going so fast, Brownlee said he thinks the cap likely didn’t get caught in the Earth’s orbit as a satellite like Sputnik and instead shot off into outer space.

Some people have doubted the incredible manhole cover story over the years. But Brownlee, with first-hand knowledge of the test, said he knows the truth.

“From my point,” he told Insider in 2016, “it sure happened.”

So the next time you look up at the stars, remember Brownlee’s story. Somewhere out there, a manhole cover launched by a nuclear bomb is probably speeding away from Earth at about 125,000 mph.

Man stargazing with a telescope



Bryan Allen/Getty Images


This story has been updated.



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