Thursday, May 10, 2007

Rocket Racing League News

RLV News has a number of recent posts on the Rocket Racing League. First, on the down side, one of the teams withdrew from the league. (That post has a couple other articles, including more that you can consider a followup from my previous post on Armadillo). Following up on that news, the RRL announces a new team. (Did they hold off on that announcement to counter the bad news? Who knows). Cosmic Log has a post that covers all of this news and some other RRL background.

I was thinking about whether or not this news is pertinent to Space Prizes. I decided it is because of all of the (2nd-order?) space prize relationships. First, the RRL plans are to demonstrate their rocket racers at the X PRIZE Cup, obviously a venue related to, but not limited to, space prizes. Second, one of the RRL founders is Peter Diamandis, who helped make the X PRIZE and won the Heinlein Prize. Third, XCOR is a major supplier for the RRL, and they had their own prize for an engine component. Finally ... well, I'm just guessing that there will be some kind of prizes (not innovation incentive prizes which are the focus here, but space-related prizes nonetheless) for the race winners, and possibly other prize angles, too.

So I now move the RRL into the "fair game for posting" category.