“The North American Eagle is a story of conquering insurmountable odds to challenge assumptions about what is possible, and we want to do the same,” says Matt Long, a Microsoft software engineer who created the broadcast system with Mark Nichols, a cloud solution architect at Microsoft. The scientists are known for The Pegasus Mission, their research project that recently streamed live telemetry from the stratosphere. It was a showcase of real-time Internet of Things (IoT) in extreme conditions.

“We’ve gone 21 miles into the upper atmosphere. We want to go 700-plus miles per hour on land. And at some point, we want to go 2 miles below the ocean,” says Long, who is partnering with Microsoft Research. His tagline for the Pegasus Mission’s blog: “Dare Mighty Things.”

Combs’ latest run brought the Eagle team one step closer to its ultimate goal of breaking the sound barrier and running the fastest car in history. Eagle owner Ed Shadle and his volunteer crew have been working to drive the Eagle at 800 miles per hour, ever since he and friend Keith Zanghi salvaged an old Lockheed fighter jet in 1998. The current “absolute” land speed record is 763 miles per hour, set by a British team in 1997.

“It’s very difficult to do. You have to solve problems all along the way to achieve this goal, and it’s the kind of thing that people with engineering minds love to do. It’s a challenge,” says Shadle, a pilot, Air Force veteran and former field engineer.

To make the Eagle go faster more safely, the team has built a high-performance hydraulics steering system and developed a magnetic braking system in combination with space-age parachutes. The vehicle also has custom wheels that can endure a speed of 800 miles per hour.