Rocket Racing League

The Rocket Racing League was a racing league that planned to use rocket-powered aircraft to race a closed-circuit air racetrack. Founded in 2005, the league made its first public flights in 2010 and was working to begin regular racing seasons. The "Rocket Racers" were slated to compete in the air and on a virtual racetrack easily viewed by a live audience as well as projected on large screen and handheld electronic displays.

Three prototype canard-style Rocket Racer aircraft were built between 2006 and 2010.

The league had planned to hold its inaugural race season in 2008 with four races, but encountered financial difficulties that delayed fielding of Rocket Racers by the six teams that had been previously announced. With the addition of venture capital funding in mid-2009, technology development continued and one exhibition occurred in 2010, with another round of plans for an inaugural season of races in 2011. The 2011 races were, in the end, never scheduled, and by 2014, the league was defunct.

Projected to be an hour and one half in length, the races were intended to be between Rocket Racer planes that used liquid oxygen and either kerosene or ethanol fuel with a burn time of four minutes. The rocketplanes were expected to cost less than US$1 million each. The planes were based on the fixed-gear Velocity SE modified by XCOR Aerospace and the retractible gear Velocity XL modified by Armadillo Aerospace for the purpose of rocket racing. The Velocity airframe was derived from a commercially available kit plane that traced its design heritage to the Rutan Long-EZ, which had been modified to accept rocket power and custom avionics. In order to provide the airframes, RRL purchased the aircraft's manufacturer, Velocity Aircraft, in April 2008.

The RRL had been called "NASCAR with rockets", XCOR Aerospace flew the Rocket Racer for a public audience at the 2008 EAA AirVenture Airshow at Oshkosh, Wisconsin. If league competition were to begin, Whitelaw indicated tournament semifinals would be held each September in Nevada, with finals each October in New Mexico at the X Prize Cup competing for a $2 million championship purse.