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Rocket Racers – Still a Place for Man in the Loop-
–by Andrew McCaskey
The article in Wired starts out explaining Rocket Racing in very few words: Nascar in the Sky. It’s being billed as the 21st century’s newest and greatest sport: rocket-powered airplanes racing around a 2-mile-wide, 5,000-foot-high racetrack, blasting out 10-foot-long flames.
It’s another brainchild of Peter Diamandis, whose Ansari X Prize awarded $10 million for the first privately built manned spaceship in 2004, the Rocket Racing League, or RRL, has already flown a prototype rocket plane and is now building the first of 10 planned X-Racers.
Three-time space shuttle astronaut and former Air Force test pilot Rick Searfoss, serves as RRL’s chief test pilot.
The first team is called Leading Edge Rocket Racing founded by former F-16 pilots Don Grantham and Bob Rickard.
“We started talking about 10 or 15 or 20 years from now,” said Rickard, “when there are no more airplanes for fighter pilots to fly and everything’s done remotely with unmanned vehicles. What’s going to happen to guys like us that want to fly fighters and pull 9 Gs and do all the things that we get to do now?” To Rickard and Grantham, the answer was obvious: They’ll fly rocket racers.”
The notion of prize competition has a long and storied history – with examples like the Transcontinental Railroad and Lindbergh’s flight. IT Conversations has a download of the talk given last summer at Poptech by Peter Diamandis which I think you will find very interesting .
You may recall the adventure from a week or two ago when my buddy lost his laptop in a disk crash where BSOD would have been an improvement. I was lucky enough to be able to muddle through a save of his data to a USB external drive using the KnoppixSTD distro from CD. Not a happy ending – his restored disk worked for about 20 minutes and then literally ground to a halt- so he did have to replace the drive.
Now a really useful guide to Fixing Windows with Knoppix has appeared online, a reprint of a chapter in the book Hacking Knoppix from Scott Granneman . You might want to plan ahead, print out the chapter and put it alongside a fresh burn of Knoppix STD when you get the call.
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