By Michael Belfiore
Feb, 02, 2006
SourceIt's being billed as the 21st century's newest and greatest sport: rocket-powered airplanes racing around a 2-mile-wide, 5,000-foot-high racetrack, blasting out 10-foot-long flames.
"The viewer experience will be unlike anything you've ever seen in motor sports," said Rocket Racing League CEO George Whitelaw at a press conference in New York this week announcing the league's first team. He should know; he's a two-time champion IndyCar team owner.
Launched last October by Whitelaw and Peter Diamandis, whose Ansari X Prize awarded $10 million for the first privately built manned spaceship in 2004, the Rocket Racing League, or RRL, has already flown a prototype rocket plane and is now building the first of 10 planned X-Racers. Three-time space shuttle astronaut and former Air Force test pilot Rick Searfoss, who serves as RRL's chief test pilot, called the rocket racers "a real kick in the pants" after a test flight in October. Searfoss compared their performance characteristics to those of fighter planes because of their high thrust-to-weight ratio.
The promise of that kind of flying excitement is what attracted Don "Dagger" Grantham and Robert "Bobaloo" Rickard to sign on as members of the RRL's first team, called Leading Edge Rocket Racing. Both men are F-16 fighter pilots as well as entrepreneurs, and they see rocket racing as the next great flying experience.
"We started talking about 10 or 15 or 20 years from now," said Rickard, "when there are no more airplanes for fighter pilots to fly and everything's done remotely with unmanned vehicles. What's going to happen to guys like us that want to fly fighters and pull 9 Gs and do all the things that we get to do now?" To Rickard and Grantham, the answer was obvious: They'll fly rocket racers.
To secure Leading Edge's place as the RRL's charter team, Rickard and Grantham paid $100,000 as a down payment on the first $1.2 million X-Racer. The pair will also have to pony up an additional $500,000 to $750,000 in race fees for the RRL's inaugural season, slated for 2007. Still, said Whitelaw, that price is a bargain compared with owning a NASCAR team, which can run $18 million.
Last month, the RRL cut a deal with the state of New Mexico and the city of Las Cruces to locate its headquarters there. "As the future home of Rocket Racing League we look forward to welcoming the hundreds of thousands of people who will come to New Mexico to enjoy NASCAR in the sky," said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson in a statement. Las Cruces donated 10 acres of land to the RRL for a 50,000-square-foot headquarters building at the airport, and has also reserved 10 aircraft hangars.
Those 10 hangars will house X-Racers for the 10 teams that will compete in the first race season. The RRL is soliciting proposals for the nine remaining slots to fill out its team roster. With only two out of six planned race venues nailed down (the annual Reno Air Races in Nevada and the X Prize Cup in New Mexico), the league is also entertaining proposals from airports around the country to host races. Members of the public can get in on the action by entering a contest to name the first X-Racer, which will debut at this year's X Prize Cup in October. The winner will get a pass to the first season's races, a personal tour of the X-Racer and an RRL bomber jacket.
Since each X-Racer will be identical, pilots will have to win their races with superior flying skills. Specifically, they'll have to carefully manage their forward momentum, or "energy," to make maximum use of just four minutes of total boost time provided by the plane's single, 1,800-pound-thrust, kerosene-and-liquid-oxygen-powered rocket engine.
Spectacular, chest-pounding rocket boosts up to 30 seconds long will be followed by periods of silent coasting. After burning through its fuel supply, each X-Racer will have to land for a pit stop, during which ground crews will quickly refuel it so it can take off again. Four or more pit stops will be required to complete each 60- to 90-minute race.
The ability to "pit" rockets like race cars is just one of the unique technical challenges faced by the RRL. RRL contractor Xcor Aerospace had already demonstrated its ability to build rocket engines that could be shut down and relit multiple times during a single flight with its EZ-Rocket prototype plane. But rapid refueling of a cryogenic liquid like liquid oxygen had never been tried before Xcor developed the RRL's proprietary system for doing so.
The RRL has also had to develop fighter-pilot-style heads-up displays that until now have only been available on military aircraft. Pilots will use these displays to fly through virtual racetracks outlined by floating, 3-D wickets that are precisely plotted by on-board GPS navigation systems. Fans on the ground will see the virtual track superimposed over the action on giant TV screens as well as on specially developed handheld units. A video game also in development by the RRL will pit fans at home against actual pilots during races.
True to his calling as a space visionary, Diamandis hopes that the technologies being developed by the RRL as well as the revenue it generates will help fuel the next generation of commercial spaceships. The rocket engines, avionics, ground operations and more can all be used for suborbital tourist ships and other vehicles still only dreamed of, but which Diamandis hopes someday to make reality.