The Bloodhound SSC is a supersonic rocket on wheels that its creators, including current land speed record holder Andy Green, hope will be the first car to top 1,000 mph. They've been working on it for nearly a decade, an epic engineering challenge that requires, among other things, doing everything possible to keep Green alive if something goes horribly wrong.

The car, if you can call it that, is part of an effort to set a new Land Speed Record. The previous record was set by Green in 1997, in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, at 763.035 mph. The new car will use a Rolls-Royce EJ200 jet engine from the Typhoon fighter plane and a rocket engine normally used to lift satellites into space. Combined, they'll generate a mind-boggling 135,000 horsepower, and, hopefully, propel the 44-foot long, 8-and-a-half-ton car to 1,000 mph.

It's hard to fathom just how fast 1,000 mph is. To put that in perspective, the four aluminum wheels will be spinning at an astonishing 10,000 RPM when the car—it seems odd to call it that–achieves terminal velocity. That's 170 times per second1. Any debris flying off that wheel could do catastrophic damage to anything that wasn't designed to withstand it. At 1,000 mph, even pebbles and sand kicked up by the vehicle can be problematic. That's why the Bloodhound team is equipping the carbon composite cockpit with lightweight ballistic panels to absorb the impact of any wayward rocks or chunks of car.

The panels, made with millions of strands of woven glass fiber, have been fitted to both sides of the cockpit. To ensure it works, the team fired a 20mm chunk of aluminum—the largest piece that could come off the wheel before the whole thing disintegrated, creating a whole new set of problems—from a cannon into a panel at about 2,200 mph or 3,280 fps. That comes to around 29 kilojoules of energy on impact. The panel absorbed the shot, with no penetration to the other side.

The team hasn't revealed when it plans to break the 1,000-mph barrier, but 2016 is a likely timeframe. Until then, the engineering team continues pondering all the ways things could go wrong, and doing everything it can to insure nothing does.

1Updated 3/13/2015 9:00AM PDT: This story was updated with the correct rotations per second of the Bloodhound's wheels.