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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.)"
In other words, the Rocket Racing league found a way to make the most common form of space propulsion marketable to the general public: entertainment. Well played. If this rocket racing league takes off, it will certainly spurn advances in chemical based propulsion and reusable rocket engines since entertainment seems to be a great way to generate R&D money for technology (see NASCAR). I'm impressed.
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It's called the Lunar Lander Challenge. Does that tell you anything?
The masses want to see blood.
NASCAR is a 500 mile left turn, hoping somebody makes a right turn.
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> 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.
I miss Rocket Racing. It was fun riding on Mongooses and shooting other people off theirs with rocket launchers.
That is, fun as long as you were playing against people who actually played to win instead of just griefing to prevent anyone else from winning. It could have used a rule that expired the invulnerability for players that stayed off a ride too long.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
With high tech sports like this, the fancy stuff gets a lot of press, but I bet the small stuff will really help out space exploration.
Take the 3D virtual race course technology, not super surprising, but super dam useful for future civilian rocket/space flight applications.
Just having a place, such as a the Rocket Racing league, that provides a venue and funding to develop bleeding edge, high risk tech is a massive boon for progress.
Safety systems, rocket aerodynamics, even flight strategy techniques. It will also provide a new employment pool and a place to get experience for new engineers, flight crew and pilots.
Its sort of well...boring.
I mean, the Chinese where doing that way back when people thought rocks where cool.
Maybe its time to throw away the standard model, which missed like 95% of reality about how the universe works, and think about a different way to do things.
First though, to do that we need to:
1) Get rid of the money surrounding rocket contracts.
2) Corrupt congressional leaders which are bought off by these contractors.
3) Maybe getting rid of group think that is required in science today to think exactly the same as everyone else if you want to get published or get funding.
oh yes....then of course there is the powers that be...because they simply will not stand for any kind of power source that will be limitless and pretty much freely available to everyone that would come about through said research because well, it threatens to end thier strangle hold on most of the world.
If you decide that really, rockets are so passe, you might want to look at any of the 4 points above.
But be very careful, trying to chaneg just ONE of the above points could be dangerous to your health.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.