April 17, 2008
The NASCAR for Rocket Scientists
The NY Times has an article on the new rocket racing league, and all the risk that it entails. This had been coming along ever since Jack Norton and Alexander Lippisch experimented with rocket powered interceptors during WWII.
The Rocket Racing League, a long-promised attempt to create a kind of Nascar of the skies, will hold its first exhibition races this year, its founders said.
The races are promised as a kind of living video game — but louder — with a virtual raceway laid out in the sky that will be visible on projection screens at the site of each event.
Racers in rocket-powered aircraft will fly four laps around a five-mile “track” at anywhere from 150 feet to 1,500 feet above the ground. The planes, designed to fly at 340 miles an hour, will start side by side, two at a time. The pilots include professional test pilots who received their training in the military and a former astronaut.
This is definitely not for the weak of heart!
Posted by elkaim at April 17, 2008 8:09 AM