Page:Popular Mechanics 1928 11.pdf/17

 

ONSTRUCTION of man-carrying rockets capable of crossing the millions of miles of outer space and reaching the planets is scientifically possible and may eventually come, according to Fritz von Opel, the German automobile builder who, within a few months, has produced a rocket automobile and a rocket airplane.

But such ideas, he adds, are still far off, and have nothing to do with the practical work of introducing the rocket age, which he visions as an era of almost unbelievably fast transportation over the face of the earth. Rocket planes, he says, will span the Atlantic in an hour and a half, rising miles above the earth's protective envelope of air into a realm where there is neither air resistance nor the vagaries of weather to be reckoned with.

What such speed, 2,000 miles an hour, would mean can be conceived by comparing it with the non-stop flight across the continent, made by Col. Arthur Goebel, winner of the Dole race, who landed in New York just eighteen hours and fifty-eight minutes after leaving Los Angeles. His average speed for the trip, which broke all existing records, was 142 miles an hour. At that speed he clipped two hours and fifty minutes off the fastest previous crossing of the continent, Lieut. Russell L. Maughan's famous "dawn to dusk" flight. But, more interesting still, the latter was made in a specially prepared racing ship, an army pursuit type, and in a series of hops, as the plane could not carry more than a few hours' gas supply. The flight of Goebel's Lockheed "Vega" plane was non-stop, carrying a full load of gasoline, and the ship itself was a stock model commercial plane, with cabin room for five passengers. The difference between Lieutenant Maughan's record and Colonel Goebel's achievement represented just four years' progress in airplane and engine building.

Only one plane had ever crossed the country non-stop before, piloted by Lieutenants MacReady and Kelley, and Goebel cut nearly eight hours off their record, besides making the flight in the opposite direction, so that he had to lift his entire load of gas over the Rocky mountains in the first hours of the flight, instead of 