The fastest manned rocket ship in the world is the North American X-15
X-15 is a hypersonic rocket aircraft designed and built by North American for NACA (later NASA) testing. It set speed records in the 1960s that remain unbroken some 60 years later. An unbelievably ambitious project that actually paid off. A lot of valuable data was gained and implemented into future aircraft design. Image Maximum Speed Even in the late 1940s aircraft designers were dreaming of speeds that not only exceeded the speed of sound but much much faster than that. The Douglas X-3 Stiletto was one such aircraft. The Stiletto was intended to fly at twice the speed of sound – an extremely impressive feat for the early 50s. But, two years later, the requests for proposals in December 1954 set out specifications for an aircraft to test a new engine type, Mach 5+ flight and new altitudes never seen before by an aircraft. Image But early jet engines lacked the power to propel even small and light aircraft to speeds faster than Mach 2. In an extremely oversimplifi...