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On July 11th, nearly a minute into the rocket trip carrying Richard Branson, the British billionaire, to space, a yellow caution light appeared on the ship’s console. The craft was about twenty miles in the air above the White Sands Missile Range, in New Mexico, and climbing, travelling more than twice the speed of ...

In 1947, Chuck Yeager, the Air Force test pilot, became the first person to break the sound barrier. He did it in a tiny, orange-colored plane called the Bell X-1—essentially, a cockpit and two wings connected to a rocket engine. Like all supersonic flyers, Yeager trailed a sonic boom behind him. The principle behin...