The Rocket Racing League, an organization that is set to put on races featuring rocket-powered experimental racing airplanes, is ready to show themselves to the world at the QuickTrip Air and Rocket Racing Show in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on April 24th. You can feel free to read that again if you’d like. We’ll wait. We don’t know much about airplanes, but this sounds like an idea nutty enough to be awesome.

The Rocket Racing League is billing themselves as “NASCAR with rockets,” according to a story we saw on Space.com. One of the co-founders of the organization is Peter Diamandis who also created the X-Prize which presses super smarty pants people to invent stuff to overcome humanity’s biggest challenges. While rocket plane racing won’t solve any of the world’s major problems, we think it is an idea whose time has come. Scratch that, we just think it is the bat-shit craziest thing we have head about in our thirty years on this planet. 

This year the RRL will be running exhibition races at air shows all across the country, they will also do these exhibition shows into 2011. To show off the planes and the pilots skills, several different things will be featured in the demonstration. There will be head to head races, time trials, and groups of planes dicing it up on the race track in the sky.

Late 2011 is supposed to see the actual start of real competition and the close of the exhibition run, that is of course, any of the pilots are still alive.

So what’s being raced? X-racers of course, which are piloted by “Top Gun” and aerobatic pilots. There will be both drag races (how the hell do you stage?!) and “road course” style competitions. Power comes from a single thrust liquid oxygen and ethanol rocket engine built by a Texas company called Armadillo Aerospace. The planes have been clocked at 300 mph. 

In other space aged touches, the helmets that the pilots wear project the course onto a 3D display in the brain bucket. Basically it’s a heads-up display in the helmet that takes the instruments from the dash to their line of sight.

If you are located in the Tulsa area, we’re begging you to go and watch this. Please report back and let us know how it goes. We recommend wearing a helmet, you know, just in case.

Source — Space.com — 

Here’s a video of a test flicht:

And here’s an animated teaser about the racing:

Meanwhile, here’s a scale-model version of the epic fail this could be: