Rocket racers get set for August takeoff

A tale of two engines
Armadillo's involvement could add an extra twist of competition to the preparations for those first flights. In the past, the league has worked exclusively with XCOR Aerospace on engine development and integration. Now XCOR, which recently advanced its plans for a much higher-flying suborbital rocket ship, will be vying with another fledgling rocket company for the league's business.

Last week, XCOR spokesman Doug Graham would say only that his company was continuing to work with the racing league. Over the past six months, the XCOR Rocket Racer has gone through a series of closely guarded test flights at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California. "We're making progress, and we're going to get it done," Graham told msnbc.com.

Armadillo's Carmack, meanwhile, said the league approached him confidentially several months ago to work on a parallel engine development project. "I actually said 'no' a couple of times, because we're not airplane guys," Carmack told msnbc.com.

However, Carmack eventually decided that the racing league's needs meshed with his own rocket development effort, which is aimed at building a "Six-Pack" vertical-takeoff craft that can rise up to the frontier of outer space.

This month, the film-cooled engine that would be used in the Armadillo Rocket Racer was fired up to push a heavy crane truck down a pavement. The engine has not yet been tested in an airframe, but Carmack said the plane still could be ready in time for August's exhibition flights. "It's a simple system," he said.

Carmack recently said he would make rocket engines available to customers at a cost of $500,000 apiece. He declined to say exactly how much the racing league was paying Armadillo for the current project - but he said the project had a higher priority than Armadillo's renewed push to win the NASA-funded Lunar Lander Challenge.

"Our deal is to make a bunch of these," he said. "If we wind up making a bunch, it's going to be a pretty good business."

He acknowledged that the venture was "still fairly speculative" but noted that "there's real work being done, and people are going to be racing rockets."

Looking ahead
Actually getting the races off the ground may seem like an ambitious enough goal — but most of the parties involved are looking past the races to bigger ventures. For XCOR as well as for Armadillo, the Rocket Racers are just an intermediate step toward higher-powered suborbital spacecraft.

"Two tanks with a rocket engine is essentially one-sixth of our notional suborbital vehicle," Carmack noted.

Whitelaw, a veteran of the professional auto-racing circuit, expects that the technologies developed by Rocket Racing's subsidiaries will feed into the wider aviation market. He drew an analogy to the way Ferrari applies the lessons learned in its race operations to the consumer automobile market.

"It's using the racing series as a test bed for technology," Whitelaw said. "Just like Formula One, we're going to be doing that for aviation and aerospace."

To that end, he said Velocity Aircraft would bring out a new line of six-seat and four-seat luxury airplanes, incorporating technologies developed for the Rocket Racers. The price tag for the six-seater would be $1 million.

"I truly believe that with the excitement of rocket racing, there are always going to be Velocities there that people can buy," Whitelaw said.

Whitelaw even cast the XCOR-Armadillo engine competition in auto-racing terms. "It gives us more choices for teams," he explained, "just like Honda or Ford or Ferrari."

Whitelaw has repeatedly acknowledged that getting the Rocket Racing League started was taking longer than he originally thought, and he has declined to discuss in detail how much the venture has cost him and his partners so far. But he emphasized that the league's backers were in it for the long haul.

"It's millions of dollars of investment for us, and tens of millions of dollars we're allocating for growing the business over the next few years," he said. "We are committed to do that."

An expanded version of this report appears as a Cosmic Log item.

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