Rocket racers get set for August takeoff

Alan Boyle Science editor • Profile • E-mail

The Rocket Racing League says its rocket-powered race planes will take off for their first public exhibition races on Aug. 1 and 2 at the EAA AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wis.

But that's just the start. The league's founders have also acquired an airframe-manufacturing company, taken on a new partner to build rocket engines and set up a string of subsidiaries.

All this is part of an effort to make high-performance aerial racing into a business on a par with high-performance auto racing.

"It's not just about racing rockets around a racetrack in the sky," said Granger Whitelaw, the league's co-founder and chief executive officer. In his view, it's also about building the future of aviation and aerospace.

For two and a half years, Whitelaw and his partners have been working to create a "NASCAR in the sky" — a series of aerial fly-offs that would draw in spectators and viewers the way auto races do today. Now Rocket Racing Inc. is aiming to take that auto-racing parallel several steps further.

Whitelaw outlined the plans during an interview late last week, in advance of Monday's formal announcement in New York:

• Two breeds of "Rocket Racer" planes would fly in public for the first time on Aug. 1 and 2 at Oshkosh, one of the year's biggest air exhibitions. Current plans call for additional exhibitions at the Reno Air Races in September, at the X Prize Cup in New Mexico (traditionally held in October) and at Aviation Nation in Las Vegas in November.

• One kerosene-fueled Rocket Racer has been under development at California-based XCOR Aerospace for more than a year. But in a surprise move, the second Rocket Racer would use an alcohol-fueled engine built by Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, under the leadership of millionaire video-game programmer John Carmack.
  
  
• The company that built the airframes for both racing planes, Florida-based Velocity Aircraft, has been acquired by Rocket Racing and will operate under the aegis of a new subsidiary called Rocket Racing Composites Corp. Velocity will build a new line of private planes as well as the airframes for future Rocket Racers.
  
  
• Other subsidiaries have been set up alongside the league to work on avionics and other electronics for the planes (Rocket Racing Technology Development) and to manage the venture's facilities in New Mexico (Rocket Racing Land).

Visions vs. realities
Whitelaw envisions a day when throngs will flock to watch rocket planes zoom through a "racetrack in the sky" at speeds in excess of 300 mph (480 kilometers per hour) and rising as high as a mile above the crowd. Video views of the race, including computer-generated 3-D graphics showing the course, would be flashed onto big screens and available via display devices, so that spectators could follow along even when the planes themselves are hard to spot.

This year's tamer exhibitions will incorporate big-screen views, but the more advanced features won't be ready right away, Whitelaw said.

The planes will be flown by the designated test pilots for the development effort: former astronaut Rick Searfoss for the XCOR Rocket Racer, and former Navy test pilot Len Fox for the Armadillo Rocket Racer. The planes are designed to zoom and glide for about 15 minutes, with the ability to be refueled rapidly between flights.

Six racing teams have signed up for the Rocket Racing League and intend to purchase rocket planes at an estimated cost of $1.2 million. Eventually, the teams plan to vie for millions of dollars in prizes. However, Whitelaw said those competitive races likely wouldn't begin until late 2009.

Between now and then, the league and the other Rocket Racing subsidiaries would have to firm up sponsorships and media deals, ramp up the production line for the planes and gain Federal Aviation Administration approval for the races. Whitelaw indicated that the FAA still had to give its final OK for this year's exhibition flights.

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