David Rosenthal: observation

Transcript context

…It is still to this day, unless there are classified programs we don't know about, the highest and fastest humans have ever flown without rocket propulsion. Yes. Okay, how are you going to do this? The only way you can do this in a jet-powered plane is to essentially design something that can run with afterburners on all the time. They're not afterburners, they're just burners. It's how the thing goes. To do that, you (a) require a tremendous amount of fuel, and (b) you also produce heat in doing so that's rocket-level proportions. The skin of the airplane gets to 500 degrees Fahrenheit. The area near the engines on the airframe itself gets almost to 1000.…

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