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Rocket Racing League Showcases New X-Racers
FleaPlus writes "The Rocket Racing League demonstrated two of their new 'Mark III' X-Racer rocketplanes at an air show in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Besides making for a fun show, the League also pushes the boundaries for reusable and easily maintainable rocket engines. (The X-Racer's liquid oxygen and ethanol rocket engine was made by John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace, which recently released a video showcasing some of the rockets they've launched and landed in the past year.)"
It's called the Lunar Lander Challenge. Does that tell you anything?
> What is the purpose of the contract for the hovering rockets? Is NASA planning landers that will have to hover somewhere - like Mars - or something?
There's a few markets for VTVL hovering rockets, being pursued by companies like Armadillo Aerospace (mentioned in the summary), Masten Space Systems, and Blue Origin:
* suborbital atmospheric science payloads: relatively little is known about the upper atmosphere, and this allows much cheaper and more frequent atmospheric sampling compared to current methods (weather balloons, million-dollar sounding rockets, etc.)
* microgravity flights: you can get a 3-4 minutes of microgravity, which is useful for biology experiments, physics experiments, and testing space systems
* space observing: you can fly instruments above the atmosphere to take some quick photos and other measurements of stellar bodies, as a lower-cost alternative to orbital space telescopes
* pop-up rockets: using the hovering rocket as a reusable booster for a second-stage which goes into orbit
* manned flights: for tourism and astronaut training
* in the future, lunar/Mars landers, for either unmanned or manned missions
* testing systems to be used on landers. Armadillo has mentioned recently that NASA is using their lander as a testbed for some systems which may be used on the "Project M" mission to land a humanoid robot on the Moon within 1000 days.