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Email a Friend	Article: Fastest Man on Earth
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Message:	I found this article at autospeed.com and thought you might be interested in reading it: 'Fastest Man on Earth' - Attached to a rocket-powered sled... On June 1, 1951, Colonel John Paul Stapp sat in a sled that was poised on a 610-metre deceleration track. Moments later, rocket thrust blasted him down the track and into a braking system. For a brief instant, Stapp endured 48 times the force of gravity, or g's, with a rate of onset at roughly 500 g's per second. As his own volunteer subject, the colonel became known as the world's fastest man when on December 10, 1954, he took a bone-and-tissue-punishing 839-metre sled ride at Holloman Air Force Base in the US. In less than a tenth of a second, rockets on back of the sled sent the vehicle at 19 g's with more than 18,000kg of thrust. Stapp's ride hit 1018 km/h - nearly supersonic speeds - before coming to a dead stop in 1.4 seconds, pushing him to 40 g's. And, for an instant, his 76kg body weighed over 3 tonnes. You can read the article at: http://www.autospeed.com/A_109806/cms/article.html