"NASCAR in the Sky"
Failure to launch? For the Rocket Racing League, which was supposed to debut its racer this month in Las Cruces, actually flying may not matter.
By David A. Fryxell
Rockets—or at any rate the intense interest in rockets—are moving the walls at the Best Western Mesilla Valley Inn. Never before has the motel had to open a second banquet room for the monthly lunchtime meeting of the Mesilla Valley Economic Development Alliance (MVEDA). But this is early February, less than three weeks after Gov. Bill Richardson's announcement that Las Cruces had attracted the world headquarters for the fledgling Rocket Racing League (RRL), and rocket fever is running high. Before Tim Gormley, a Socorro native and New Mexico State University grad recently been named the league's vice president of operations, can begin his talk, walls and tables must be moved to accommodate an overflow crowd.
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Artist's conception of a rocket
race. (Courtesy Rocket Racing League) |
Gormley's boyish looks—sandy-haired, lean and tanned, with rimless eyeglasses reflecting the fluorescent lights—belie his more than 20 years of "operations management experience in a technical environment. . . both at the Fortune 50 and start-up level," as a RRL press release puts it. He graduated with an engineering degree from NMSU in 1984, but left southern New Mexico because job opportunities here were too limited. Many of his peers, he says, had to do the same thing—a situation the Rocket Racing League promises to help remedy.
Before Gormley cues up a promotional video, he asks the crowd of more than 100 movers and shakers, "Do you believe southern New Mexico should be a leader in space technology?"
A roomful of arms rocket skyward in response—even though the Rocket Racing
League is as yet little more than a dream, a slick Web site and promo and
a bunch of promises on paper.
Eight months later, on the eve of the promised inaugural exhibition flight of its first Mark-1 X-Racer, the Rocket Racing League remains as intangible as a rocket contrail. The futuristic enterprise that Gov. Richardson ballyhooed as "NASCAR in the sky" was supposed to officially launch this month at the annual X Prize Cup Expo, Oct. 20-21 at the Las Cruces airport. But now that's not going to happen, according to RRL spokesperson Sandy Davenport: "We'd hoped to be able to unveil it, but the X-Racer won't be ready in time." Instead, X Prize attendees will have to make do with a "huge exhibit" on the RRL, videos on a giant plasma TV and a rocket-flight simulator. The league also still plans to announce the winner of an AOL-co-sponsored contest to name its absent vehicle.
"We're holding off on flying until we're prepared from a business standpoint. . . . It has nothing to do with the technology," league CEO Granger Whitelaw told Space.com. "The technology is 100 percent there. The vehicle and the engine are on track as far as that goes."
This isn't the only delay in the jump from hype to reality for the Rocket Racing League. Originally, the actual racing season was scheduled to begin in February 2007, with races at two air shows and two auto-racing events, followed by semi-finals at the annual Reno Air Races and an inaugural championship event at next year's X Prize Cup in Las Cruces. Now, however, racing won't launch until late next year, maybe October 2007, says Davenport.
Firming up additional locations—besides Las Cruces and Reno—for the promised six-event season has also gone slowly, despite the league's ambitious plans. By 2008, the RRL Web site (www.rocketracingleague.com) says the league will expand to seven venues, with 10 by 2009 including the first international event—perhaps in Singapore, Dubai or Australia, according to Gormley. The Web site adds, "Starting in year three, the Rocket Racing League will procure additional venues with the goal of keeping approximately one-third of the venues outside the United States, preferably in countries with viable X Prize Cup teams."
But the RRL has been stuck at two venues, both in the US, since the beginning of this year. Davenport concedes that the search for sites has been difficult: "Some applicants have been pretty good; some are not what we're looking for."
Much the same might be said for the effort to recruit the league's initial 10 teams. The RRL announced its first team not long after the news of its New Mexico headquarters: Leading Edge, founded by two former F-16 pilots from Arizona, Robert "Bobaloo" Rickard and Don A. "Dagger" Grantham, Jr. Leading Edge swiftly announced the hiring of F-16 pilot Korey "Axe" Amundson (evidently nicknames are de rigeur for flying F-16s and rocketplanes) as the team's first pilot.
X Marks the Prize Though it won't feature the first rocket-powered flight of the Rocket Racing League's X-Racer, the annual X Prize Cup will still have plenty for flight fans. The event is scheduled for Friday and Saturday, Oct. 20-21, from 7 a.m. (gates open at 6 a.m.) to 4 p.m. at the Las Cruces International Airport. Admission is $10 for one day, $15 for a two-day pass; students with ID, $5; children 3-12, $5. Active military personnel with ID, students attending with a teacher as part of an official X PRIZE Cup field trip and children under three get in free. Parking is $5. Friday, Oct. 20, events include: Lunar Lander Challenge Round One Competitions, Vertical Rocket Challenge Round One Competitions, Student Field Trip, Student Rocket Fly-Off, Jet Pack Flight, T-38 Fly-Overs, Rocket Bike, Rocket Truck, Sounding Rockets, Elevator Games, Saturday, Oct. 20, events include: Lunar Lander Challenge Round Two Competitions, Vertical Rocket Challenge Round Two Competitions, T-38 Fly-Overs, Rocket Bike, Rocket Truck, Sounding Rockets, Elevator Games. For more information, see www.xprizecup.com. |
Fielding a RRL team isn't cheap. Teams like Leading Edge have to cough up a $100,000 down payment on a Mark-1 X-Racer, and the league estimates upfront costs will ultimately total $1.2 million per team. Figure another $500,000 to $1 million a year in operational costs, according to the league. That's not exactly chump change, but it nonetheless pales beside the $18 million it can cost to own a NASCAR team.
Earlier this year, the Rocket Racing League issued a Request for Proposals (RFP) seeking additional teams, with a deadline for letters of intent by March 31. Semi-finalists among the applicants were supposed to be announced on July 4, with the final roster of teams promised by August 4. Neither public deadline was met, and a second team was not announced until Sept. 17. The new team, founded by Navy pilot Lt. James Bridenstine and his wife Michelle, was unveiled at the Reno Air Show.
Davenport says the league still plans on opening with 10 teams, but adds, "We'll start with what we have."
"We need a team from New Mexico," says Gormley. "We've got people working on that already. For New Mexico to be part of the stable would only be appropriate."
As with NASCAR, corporate sponsorship is seen as a huge component of RRL revenue—but that, too, has come more slowly than boosters had hoped. Back in January, league CEO Granger Whitelaw said the RRL would soon begin announcing corporate sponsors. No sponsors have actually been named to date, however, although Davenport says, "We're in negotiations. Just yesterday we got contacted by another major potential sponsor—a really big one. Like with NASCAR, we're talking with the big guys. Sponsorship will be a big part of what we do with the league."
The scheduling delays and missed dates shouldn't come as any surprise, she adds. "We always knew there was a lot involved in launching this," Davenport says. "It's not just the racing—it's merchandising, teams, venues, media. People don't really grasp it yet—even those of us right in the middle of it—how really big this is."
The video that Gormley screens for the MVEDA crowd makes the Rocket Racing League look every pixel as big and real as, well, NASCAR. The video opens with a shot of a group of children, as an announcer intones, "Racing in the dirt is for kids. It's time to grow up, get extreme and leave the dirt behind!" A quick cut takes the scene to a New Mexico-looking landscape, where now the kids are watching goggle-eyed as a rocket zooms past. The image recalls the canyon-racing scenes of The Phantom Menace, the first Star Wars prequel in which young Anakin Skywalker aces the intergalactic competition in his "podracer." Rocket racing, the announcer continues, will be "the mother of all races. . . a giant leap into the future of speed racing."
Judging by the media interest, at least, the Rocket Racing League has already taken off. The October 2005 announcement of the league's formation and the January 2006 news that it would headquarter in Las Cruces made headlines on CNN and CNBC, on Wired.com and on the cover of Popular Science magazine. Just last month, the RRL was the subject of stories in Outside and Business 2.0 magazines, with more ink on the way from The Robb Report and Men's Journal. Plus the league has already signed with the William Morris Agency to help handle the interest from Hollywood.
"Just Google 'Rocket Racing League' and you'll see," Gormley teases. (Some 61,600 hits at last count.)
The merchandising and licensing action seems equally frenetic: The league is talking with LEGO about toys, developing video games, and negotiating with Microsoft about a rocket add-on to the software giant's Flight Simulator program. Can Rocket Racing League action figures be far behind?
With all these earthbound marketing opportunities, Gormley says, "We could do well and never actually race!"
The capacity crowd of Las Cruces businesspeople chuckles at this, a bit nervously. He's joking, right?
Gov. Richardson and Economic Development Secretary Rick Homans insist that the Rocket Racing League is no joking matter. The arrival of the league is integral to their proposed $225 million Spaceport America, planned on a remote 27-acre site near Upham, between Las Cruces and Truth or Consequences (see the February 2006 Desert Exposure). In announcing the RRL's relocation to New Mexico, the governor spoke of "welcoming the hundreds of thousands of people who will come" to enjoy rocket racing here.
"Our strategy is to attract new companies that have new technologies and new ideas and business models," Homans said, "and the Rocket Racing League fits that completely. These are the seeds that will grow into a whole industry years from now and employ thousands of New Mexicans."
A report prepared for the state by the Futron Corp., a leading aerospace consulting firm, projected the RRL would bring $62 million in economic activity and 630 new jobs to New Mexico by 2015, rising to $78 million and 780 jobs by 2020. That doesn't even include "expenditures by spectators attending league finals at the spaceport." Overall, spaceport boosters are counting on the brand-new league—which has yet to fly its first race, remember—to generate 10 percent of the spaceport's total economic impact by 2020.
"It’s truly an accomplishment for New Mexico to get us here long-term," Gormley says. "A lot of people would like to have the Rocket Racing League in their state."
There's just one problem with the rosy scenarios of hundreds of thousands of RRL fans streaming to the middle of nowhere to cheer their high-tech heroes at Spaceport America: At least initially, all the action and economic activity generated by the league is in Las Cruces, not at the remote spaceport site near Upham.
In April, the Las Cruces City Council approved an economic development plan that conveys 11.5 acres at the West Mesa Industrial Park to the RRL. A beaming Mayor Bill Mattiace cracked, "Gentlemen, start your engines." Separately, the council also okayed 20-year leases, with two five-year extensions for a total of up to 30 years, on six, 100,000-square-foot tracts at the Las Cruces International Airport, where the RRL plans to build hangars for its rocket-powered planes. As part of the deal, the council voted to extend the airport's east taxiway by 400 feet and bring utilities from the airport to the league's HQ, at a total cost of about $240,000.
The RRL building on the nearby industrial park is envisioned at 50,000 square feet, costing about $2 million to build. It's expected to generate $140,000 annually in gross receipts taxes, according to city officials. The league HQ will initially house at least 30 jobs, at salaries ranging from $32,000 to $150,000-plus, and Gormley says local employment will rise to 100 jobs by 2010.
"This is a very good program for a number of reasons," says Steve Vierck, executive director of the MVEDA. "Sure there is some risk, but there is an opportunity for substantial economic return."
Despite the RRL's missed milestones since the initial land deal, Whitelaw came knocking again in mid-September, asking the Las Cruces City Council to sell it another 168.6 acres at the West Mesa Industrial Park. The RRL offered the city $2.3 million for the property, which Whitelaw said would be marketed as the "Rocket Racing League Industrial Park." In a letter, he described the park as "a world-class destination for businesses and tourists. From the time you leave Interstate 10 and enter the park, visitors will know that they are at the 'Home of the RRL,' and over time its history will make it a sought-after destination for visitors from around the world."
The league also asked for a right of first refusal on another 175 acres in the airport area. The council was expected to put the requests on the agenda for its October 4 meeting.
In addition to the airport developments, the RRL plans to build a 10,000-square-foot research and development center at NMSU's Arrowhead Park. The park sits on 257 acres at the southern end of campus, sandwiched between I-25 and I-10, and already is home to 15 high-tech startups. League CEO Whitelaw says, "The university has an unprecedented opportunity to turn its research park into the state's premiere R&D hub for advanced industries. NMSU officials share our vision of the park as a major cornerstone for other businesses to build up around us in collaboration with what we do. We envision a 'Microsoft effect,' a steady, critical-mass build-up."
Although Gormley says the league "will initially be at the airport and then the spaceport" and that it's "completely in support of the spaceport," he adds that an enterprise like the RRL needs a metro area for entertaining Fortune 500 bigwigs and hosting aerospace conferences. "At Microsoft, they have a huge auditorium where people come to find out where Microsoft is going next. I envision that happening here, with companies coming to find out where we're going."
Not only does the RRL need a metro area, it would really like Las Cruces to get off the dime and build the much-talked-about convention center: "We need a new convention center," says Gormley. "I'm not going to build a 350-seat auditorium out at the airport."
And he cautions that the rocket-powered economic boom is not a slam dunk for Las Cruces and New Mexico. "We need to mobilize the state. We need good staffing and auxiliary businesses. Otherwise we'll have to outsource all this work," Gormley says, adding, "I'm committed to trying to help keep as much of the dollars here as we possibly can."
Just how many dollars are we talking about, long-term? The examples that RRL boosters inevitably cite are Charlotte, NC, which has reaped multi-billion-dollar benefits from the NASCAR boom, or Indianapolis and the Indy 500. Says Gormley, "We're putting our world headquarters here and all of the business that goes with running a league. If you look at what NASCAR has done with Charlotte, NC, and what open-wheel racing has done for Indianapolis, that's our vision."
In a 2003 study, University of North Carolina-Charlotte economics professor John Connaughton pegged the annual economic benefit of the motor-sports industry to that region at $3.9 billion. Some $2.4 billion of that total came from direct spending by the auto-racing industry, with another $808 million in indirect impact. NASCAR and related racing enterprises were responsible for 17,720 jobs in the 12-county region around Charlotte, the study said, with 9,558 jobs directly created by motor sports.
Not surprisingly, the idea for the Rocket Racing League was born from auto racing. Granger Whitelaw, a venture capitalist who's hopscotched through 20 companies in the past 15 years, had co-founded a technology think-tank called TrendSphere. In 2000, TrendSphere attracted Peter H. Diamandis, the space booster behind the X Prize and now a key backer of New Mexico's spaceport. (Among other things, Diamandis also co-founded the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, serves as CEO of Zero Gravity Corp., and co-founded Space Adventures, Inc., which brokered the first space-tourism flights to the International Space Station. This summer, Diamandis was named the first recipient of the $500,000 Heinlein Prize, named for the late science fiction writer Robert Heinlein and funded by a trust from his royalties.) Shortly after Diamandis joined TrendSphere and became friends with Whitelaw, the venture capitalist took the space visionary to his first auto race, the Indianapolis 500.
The night after the race, Whitelaw and Diamandis began to cook up what would become the Rocket Racing League. Besides his financial background, Whitelaw had also owned several successful Indy racing teams, so the idea of racing—but with rockets—was a short leap.
Diamandis already had the idea for a competition to build a privately funded spacecraft, based initially in St. Louis for its echoes of Charles Lindbergh and The Spirit of St. Louis. That scheme suffered a blow with 9/11—until the ever-resourceful Diamandis picked up a copy of Fortune magazine and read about a wealthy woman, Anouseh Ansari, and her desire to board "a civilian-carrying suborbital shuttle." By late 2002, he'd convinced Ansari to pony up the premium for a $10 million insurance policy that would pay the winner, if any, of what was now the Ansari X Prize Cup.
The success of that competition would prove crucial in creating the technology for the Rocket Racing League (as well as for Sir Richard Branson's proposed Virgin Galactic space-tourism flights at New Mexico's spaceport). Burt Rutan's company, Scaled Composites, won the prize with SpaceShipOne in 2004. By that time, Diamandis had jettisoned his St. Louis backers and formed a partnership with New Mexico, promising to bring a "rocket festival" to Las Cruces. The idea that his Rocket Racing League might follow the X Prize Cup to southern New Mexico was a natural.
All they needed now was a rocket to race with. Diamandis and Whitelaw teamed with XCOR Aerospace—based, like Rutan's company, in Mojave, Calif.—which had "rocketized" a Rutan-designed airplane to create the EZ-Rocket. They also hired Rick Searfoss, an Air Force-trained test pilot and ex-Space Shuttle commander working for XCOR, as the Rocket Racing League's first test pilot. With Searfoss at the controls, the EZ-Rocket made an ear-shattering demonstration flight at the Countdown to the X Prize at the Las Cruces airport in October 2005.
The airframe for the league's actual rocket racers will come from Velocity Aircraft, a small manufacturer of kit airplanes—also based on Rutan's design—in Sebastian, Fla. In April, at the annual Sun 'n' Fun Fly-In air show in Lakeland, Fla., the RRL took delivery of its first training craft, the Velocity-made Mark-1 X-Racer. Although initially powered by a standard piston engine, the X-Racer trainer is slated for eventual conversion to rocket power, and a second X-Racer was said to be getting its XCOR rocket engine installed even as the trainer was unveiled. The first "real" X-Racer was then supposed to debut at this month's X Prize event in Las Cruces, but evidently there are still a few bugs in the system.
"We look forward to seeing our SE airframe morph into the Mark-1, taking to the skies in roaring vertical flight trailing 20-foot rocket plumes," said Velocity president Scott Swing. (Gormley promises 40-foot tails of flame.) He added, "While the flight characteristics of the X-Racer will be somewhat different due to the acceleration of the rocket engine, the prop-powered training plane will still be useful in helping RRL pilots get used to how the basic airframe flies. The Velocity is quite stable and easy to fly—probably too easy for guys used to flying F-16s—but future versions will be more sophisticated."
To turn what's essentially a souped-up kit airplane into a rocket racer powered by 1,500-1,800 pounds of thrust, the RRL had to overcome some steep technical challenges. Initially, XCOR president Jeff Greason told Popular Science, "We were afraid we might have a law-of-physics problem." Could rockets really be refueled fast enough to get them back in the air in five minutes or less, four or more times, during an hour-long race, much the way their automobile counterparts take pit stops? The original EZ-Rocket needed two to three hours between flights, with up to 45 minutes just to refuel with liquid oxygen. Last October, though, XCOR successfully tested filling a rocket tank with 250 pounds of liquid oxygen in only 50 seconds.
Engineers also had to develop a new reciprocating piston pump capable of delivering the rocket's fuel under pressure. The successful design, according to Popular Science, "delivers fuel in spurts, like a bicycle pump squirting air into a tire."
The other big technical hurdle was developing a "heads-up" display similar to that used by fighter pilots—and, up to now, available only on military aircraft. That's because the race course the X-Racers will fly exists only virtually.
"It's a video game that the pilots fly within," Gormley explains. "The avionics will originate from video gaming; we can change the course for any event. There's so much versatility compared to an auto-racing track. All you need is bleachers, a runway and a security fence and you can have a show."
Pilots will see the aerial track and the obstacles they must steer around only in their helmet displays. Spectators on the ground will be able to watch the same view on a giant Jumbotron. Someday, fans on TV or the Internet will see the virtual course the same way.
To win, pilots will have to make maximum use of four to five minutes of thrust per fueling, with another six minutes or so of gliding in-between pit stops. To avoid having all the racers in the air at once—and then all grounded in simultaneous pit stops—pilots will take off in pairs, staggered a few minutes apart and competing against the clock. A complete day of rocket racing might last an hour and a half.
Initially, the race courses will be horizontal, but Gormley envisions a day when racers will blast off and race vertically as well. Despite the finale of the RRL promotional video, in which an X-Racer leaves the earth behind and rockets into space, there are no plans for races beyond the stratosphere. Yet.
Surprisingly little of the Rocket Racing League's revenue model depends on any actual racing, however, as Gormley's little jest at the MVEDA suggests. Getting in to a race will of course require buying a ticket; although ticket prices have yet to be set, they will be comparable to other racing events. The league also hopes to sell broadcasting rights to its events.
Gormley ticks off five other revenue sources the RRL is counting on, none directly related to actual racing:
He also mentions the possibility of an IMAX film of rocket racing, plus a children's animated TV series. The spinoff opportunities are endless: "I hear from people every day through our Web site who are asking, 'Where do I get a hat pin, hats, shirts, bomber jackets, models, toys?'"
Already, the RRL online store offers several types of ballcaps and visors ($12.99-$18.95), a "This IS Rocket Science" T-shirt ($20), a Space Travel Mug ($14.95), polo shirts ($39.95) and a patch and lapel pin ($9.95). Not bad for a racing league that's yet to run its first race or fly its first real rocket.
Presumably, though, at some point the Rocket Racing League will actually have to take flight—and not just in the imagination. At that point, the question becomes: If you race it, will they come? RRL officials and Gov. Richardson talk confidently of hundreds of thousands of spectators flocking to rocket-race events, just as they do to NASCAR or Indy Racing League events. Gormley also likens the RRL's appeal to air shows, which he says "are the single biggest-attended events in the world. It's not unusual to attract 300,000 to 400,000 people."
Indeed, according to Aerosports Marketing Group, the seven air shows in 2003 at which it promoted the Air Force Reserve attracted a total of more than 7 million spectators. The annual EAA AirVenture Oshkosh air show in Wisconsin—the US' biggest civilian air show—estimates its attendance at 700,000; because that number counts multiple visits by a single person during the weeklong event, however, the actual number of different individuals in attendance is probably closer to 200,000 to 300,000.
Some experts aren't so sure that rocket racing can attract such crowds, however. In an interview with Popular Science, Indy Racing League executive vice president Fred Nation cautioned, "All auto-racing series try to capitalize on the relationship that people have to their cars because they drive them. All of us probably feel in some ways, 'Well, I can do that.'" Except for a few pilots in the stands, rocket racing lacks that fundamental connection.
"Auto racing gains part of its appeal from the risks the drivers take," Nation went on. "You can clearly identify with the risks that auto-racing drivers take because you can see that it's close. In the Indy Racing League, they're wheel-to-wheel. What is really close, I would imagine, for rockets or airplanes may not appear that close."
RRL boosters remain undaunted by such doubts. In a cheery email newsletter ("Hey X-Racer Fans!!"), CEO Whitelaw says, "Creating a brand-new 21st-century sport like rocket racing is like cooking a 50-course dinner and making sure it all comes out on time and in the proper order. Fortunately, we have some extraordinary cooks in the kitchen and everything is going according to plan."
As the RRL promotional video puts it, the league is now "seeking real heroes" to pilot its rocket racers before "jubilant racing fans." The future of racing, the video proclaims, is simple and irresistible: "Take a race car and tilt it up into the sky."
Here in New Mexico, the sky is ready and waiting.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.