Serious Geekdom from the mind of Dr. Peter Diamandis.
Dr. Diamandis was the guy behind the $10M X-Prize which Burt Rutan's team won recently. Now Dr. Diamandis wants to do rocket racing. As a sport. Move over NASCAR, you are sooooo old...
The Rocket Racing League website. The BBC has a nice writeup too:
X-Prize man launches rocket race
Peter Diamandis, the man behind the $10m X-Prize for suborbital space travel, has brought forward his new initiative: the Rocket Racing League.
The RRL will see Grand Prix-style races between rocket planes, flown by top pilots through a "3D trackway" just 5,000ft (1,500m) above the ground.
The first "X-Racers" will be built for the series, but it is hoped new teams will soon enter with novel designs.
Events will be staged across the US, culminating in a final in New Mexico.
Dr Diamandis says the RRL's mission, much like the Ansari-sponsored X-Prize, is to serve as a technology accelerator.
He wants it to speed up development in the areas of airframe, propulsion and spacecraft design.
The concept behind the league may remind people of the pod races in The Phantom Menace, the first of the Star Wars prequels.
"The Rocket Racing League will inspire people of all ages to once again look up into the sky to find inspiration and excitement," said Dr Diamandis, who holds the position of chairman in RRL.
And how close is this to actually happening?
The first RRL events are expected to take place next year.
Dr Diamandis said the races would be run over aerial tracks that were about two miles (3.2km) long, one mile (1.6km) wide, and about 5,000ft high, running perpendicularly to spectators.
The X-Racers will take off from a runway both in a staggered fashion and side by side, and fly a three-dimensional course with long straights, vertical ascents, and deep banks.
Each pilot will follow his or her own "virtual tunnel" of space with the aid of satellite-navigation technology, safely separated from their competitors by a minimum distance.
Spectators will be able to follow the races by looking at the exhaust plumes in the sky and on hand-held GPS tracking devices.
The project has the support of the US Federal Aviation Administration.
Very cool! Here are three photos from the Rocket Racing League website:
X-1 Racer taxiing for takeoff
X-1 pit stop -- refueling
X-2 Racer concept mockup
Take NASA's budget and give it to these kinds of people and we will have tourists on the Moon in a few years.
