The fastest most people will ever travel is around 600 miles per hour – the speed of a commercial airplane – so its understandably quite difficult to properly comprehend quite how rapid hypersonic speed can be.
Certain simulations have show quite how speedy the International Space Station would be if it was orbiting just above sea level, yet that only gives a glimpse of quite how much faster things can become, especially if humans have any hope of reaching distant planets located light-years away.
That's where YouTube channel RED SIDE comes in handy, as they have created a fantastic 3D mach speed simulation across four different scenarios, showing quite how fast you'd be travelling at speeds of up to 670,616,629mph.
How fast is mach speed?
There is no singular mach speed measurement, as 'mach' is instead a unit of speed which is defined as the ratio of an objects speed relative to the speed of sound in their surrounding environment.
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For example, Mach 1 is the speed of sound, which is the equivalent to 761.23 miles per hour at sea level under normal conditions, and this increases exponentially with each new Mach, with Mach 2 equating to double the sound of speed, Mach 3 triple, and so on.
Speeds above Mach 1 are identified as 'supersonic', whereas speeds exceeding Mach 5 – equating to around 3,836 miles per hour in the right conditions – are categorized as hypersonic.
What do mach speeds look like?
The aforementioned RED SIDE video, as shared by Supercar Blondie, shows the potential of various forms of mach speed in four different scenarios: instant velocity, fixed angle, circular motion, and orbiting Earth.
The first three go from just 3.1 mph to 5,000 Mach, equating to roughly 3,836,345 mph, whereas the last one showing Earth's orbit ranges up to the speed of light, equivalent to 874,030 Mach or 670,616,629 mph.
In the first simulation which shows how far each speed would travel across five seconds from the ground upwards, it takes until just the second run of 31 miles per hour to reach a G-Force of 14.61 — far higher than any human can typically withstand.
By far the most fascinating run is the video's last though, as it shows what traveling around the Earth's orbit at light-speed would look like. You can barely make out anything below, and the staggering speed of light would allow you to perform 7.5 orbits per second.