Remind me of a couple of good old British rocket powered aerospace vehicles.
The first is the bloodhound radar guided SAM. Probably where this project took its name from. This beast had legendary performance and was powered by solid fuel rocket motors and two ram jets. "By the time the missile has just cleared the launcher it is doing 400 mph. By the time the missile is 25 feet from the launcher it has reached the speed of sound (around 720 mph). Three seconds after launch, as the four boost rockets fall away, it has reached Mach 2.5 which is roughly 1,800 mph"
The best bit was that its warhead was a chain link - come along side a target, explode and cut it to pieces...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_BloodhoundI remember visiting one of these missile batteries as an Air Cadet in the early 80's at a place called Barkstone Heath. I will never forget that.
The other was the Saunders Roe SR53/177 mixed propulsion interceptors. After dealing successfully with the safety shortcomings of the Me 163 Komet fuels/rocket motor this aircraft had a small jet engine (Viper) for cruise and landing and a Rocket motor (Spectre) for high speed dash/climb. I love the names of the powerplants - straight from Jerry Anderson's Captain Scarlet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saunders-Roe_SR.53Unfortunately both came a croper, as did many other Aircraft with the Sandy's white paper and the infamous 1960's Lockheed 'dirty tricks' with the F104 Starfighter, where many European polititians (especially the Germans) got caught with thier hands in the sweet jar again. The last prototype for the SR53 is at Cosford Air museum.
Got to love the Cold War....
