Red Bull Air Racing is going to look like shopping cart races in a few years. Unveiled in Oshkosh, WI yesterday, the Rocket Racing League is a brand new sport guaranteed to change the face of aviation. Pilots navigate their rocket powered plane through a series of checkpoints appearing on their heads-up display while GPS monitors keep track of their position, speed and altitude. On top of this, the league plans to incorporate first-person gameplay (Xbox, Nintendo, etc) into the real-time races, letting people compete against actual participants at home in real-time. Obviously, this isn’t your mothers NASCAR.
The Pentagon is being very hush-hush about it, but a secret weapon we posses in the US military is a solid rocket-fuel incendiary fireball. Meant to take out chemical weapons labs or underground bunkers, these fireballs burn up anything located inside the structure without blowing it up. “These are hollow spheres, made of rubberized rocket fuel; when ignited, they propel themselves around at random at high speed, bouncing off the walls and breaking through doors, turning the entire building into an inferno.” If there’s one thing that could ruin a persons day, it’s a bunch of solid rocket-fuel fireballs bouncing around in a small area.
Due to the secretive nature of the new weapon, not much is being said, but Wired, who initially reported the story, says that it’s quite possible the fireballs (named “CrashPAD” and “Shredder”) have been put into some sort of low-rate production. One wonders if this was the secret military weapon Bob Woodward was talking about a few months ago.
How long would it take for this guy to deliver your pizza?
This rocket man is a trained pilot and engineer, so it doesn’t
look like us laymen will be flying with these wings any time soon,
but I can see a lot of benefits such as first medical response,
amazing camera work, high-speed delivery and of course military
applications. However, I am optimistic that going tandem will be a
near term option.
