"For anything to travel from Kapustny to Balkash in 24 minutes, it had to fly at a speed of three miles a second. That’s 180 miles a minute or 10,800 miles an hour. If the reports were indeed true, the Topol RS 12 or the Topol SS 27, as it is known in military circles around the world, had to be the fastest thing man has ever seen. And if you will for a moment excuse the breathlessness, it also represented the pinnacle of modern missile technology. Until this test, the fastest thing known to man was the X43 A. A hypersonic, unmanned plane built by NASA. It flew at 10 times the speed of sound—almost 7,200 miles per hour." - τorƍue