Rocket Racing League exhibition flight in Oshkosh

First exhibition flights for the Rocket Racing League will be in Oshkosh this year. [Link]

Combining the exhilaration of racing, with the power of rocket engines and the appeal of video gaming, Rocket Racing League (RRL) CEO Granger Whitelaw said the new sports entertainment league is the sport for geeks. “We haven’t really had a sport, but now we do,” said Whitelaw, a self-professed geek at a press conference on April 14, 2008. “We now have one where we combine real athletes and real heroes with rocket planes and with gaming that we love to do so much.” At the press conference, members of the RRL announced its live first exhibition, to be held August 1st and 2nd at the EAA AirVenture airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, one of the largest airshows in the world. Additional exhibitions later in the year were also announced.

Whitelaw said in this new “futuristic and innovative sport” pilots will race rocket powered aircraft through a three-dimensional track in the sky. The planes will compete side by side, and feature multiple races pitting up to ten Rocket Racers with a 4-lap, multiple elimination heat format on a 5-mile "Formula One"-like closed circuit raceway. The Rocket Racer pilots will view the "raceway in the sky" via cockpit in-panel and 3D helmet displays. On the ground, spectators at airshows can watch the action live, or on screens that include the 3-D raceway. And in this ultimate reality show, viewers at home can watch on television, and gamers can take part with virtual competition.

In August, for the first exhibition, two Rocket Racers will compete head-to-head in a demonstration race and the expected 700,000 people in attendance at EAA AirVenture will witness the racing action live on multiple 50 foot large projection screens.

More on the league from MSNBC. [Link]

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 today'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 the Oshkosh show, 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 in 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).