The Sky's Not the Limit
By Christopher Dow
Former naval aviator Jim Bridenstine is one of a new breed of pilots working within the burgeoning private-sector space industry, preparing to go one step farther: flying a rocket-propelled aircraft in the recently formed Rocket Racing League. It’s a risky venture, but the energetic Bridenstine is used to taking chances.
Jim Bridenstine grew up in Arlington, Texas, and moved to Tulsa, Okla., when he was a junior in high school. “I always loved airplanes and wanted to be a pilot,” he says. “I wanted to join the Air Force right out of high school, but my parents convinced me to wait until after college.” Although he was accepted at a number of good universities, Bridenstine came to Rice because of the men’s swim team, and he eventually served as team captain. He met his wife to be, Michelle, while the two were college interns at the Fort Worth Star Telegram. She was a journalism major at the University of Oklahoma, but coincidentally, both had gone to the same high school in Tulsa, though they hadn’t known each other at the time. They carried out a long-distance romance until Jim graduated in 1998 with a triple major in economics, managerial studies and psychology. “I thought everything was going to settle down,” Michelle says. “Jim would take a job, and we’d get married and have a normal life.” She chuckles. “It didn’t work out that way.”
Taking Off
Instead, Bridenstine decided to pursue his dream of being a pilot. Initially, he considered the Air Force, but he wanted to fly from an aircraft carrier, so he signed up with the U.S. Navy. After officer candidate school and flight training, he qualified to fly E-2C fighter jets, and he saw combat as part of several operations in the Middle East, including Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, Operation Southern Watch and Shock and Awe in Iraq.
Following his last overseas tour, he was stationed at Naval Air Station Fallon, about an hour east of Reno, Nev., where he served as a flight instructor training E-2C and F-18 pilots for about three years. It was during this time that he learned about rocket racing from an article in Popular Science, and he immediately knew he wanted to be part of it.
Michelle was skeptical at first, but the more the two of them talked about it, the more interested—and excited—they became. For one, Bridenstine was about to leave the Navy, but the prospect of piloting a desk in an office didn’t appeal to him. Instead, he was looking ahead to a career that would allow him to remain in the aerospace industry, especially in an entrepreneurial role. “At first, I was anticipating his retirement from the Navy and a nice comfortable job somewhere and just kind of living a life very much like we grew up with,” Michelle says. “But I’ve accepted the fact that that’s not who Jim is. And as I’ve researched and read about rocket racing and helped Jim build his presentation, I can’t imagine it’s not going to be successful. I’m thrilled.”
The X Prize
The Rocket Racing League finds its genesis in the X Prize Foundation, an organization begun by Peter H. Diamandis. In 1996, the X Prize Foundation put up the $10 million Ansari Prize, to be awarded to the first group to put a manned space craft into orbit twice in two weeks without any governmental assistance. The prize was finally claimed in 2004 by Burt Rutan and his SpaceShipOne. “That was the historical moment that really launched private manned space travel,” Bridenstine says. “Now you see companies like Virgin Galactic, Kissler Aeronautics and Blue Origin beginning to build rockets for space tourism.”
Since awarding the Ansari Prize, the X Prize Foundation has continued its support of privatized space ventures through the ongoing $2.5 million Lunar Lander Challenge. And now, there’s the foundation’s Rocket Racing League. “You have all this private-sector space innovation that’s happening for space tourism purposes,” Bridenstine says. “What Peter Diamandis decided to do was create a racing league modeled after NASCAR, except instead of racing cars, we’re going to race manned airborne rockets on a three-dimensional track in the sky.”
Diamandis brought in Granger Whitelaw, two-time IndyCar-winning team owner, to serve as president and CEO and to develop the parameters of the new sport. Rocket racing has several goals. One is to provide safe and thrilling experiences for racing fans through live events, television broadcasts and interactive technologies. A second is to help stimulate advances in safe, low-cost and reliable rocket-powered vehicles for future space travel. And finally, it will inspire future generations of explorers and adventurers and get children interested in science and math.
“This seemed like a great way to stay active in aviation and do it in the private sector,” Bridenstine says. “What really got me excited is the idea of racing manned rockets and being part of an organization that is going to advance rocket science and space technology using private sector mechanisms.”
Teamwork
It’s one thing to be excited about a prospect and another thing entirely to get involved, especially in something as heady and expensive as racing rocket-propelled aircraft. Bridenstine started making inquiries, and the league executives agreed that he had the qualifications to pilot a rocket plane, but they turned him down, saying he just wasn’t in the same financial league as most of the other prospective team owners.
Undaunted, Bridenstine formed the Bridenstine Rocket Racing Team, sold some real estate he had in southern California to raise enough capital to purchase one of the rocket planes and put together a top-notch team to support him. Some of the team members are family: Michelle serves as director of public relations, and Jim’s dad, Wayne, who has more than 30 years of experience as a financial officer, is director of finance. Bridenstine also enlisted two more Navy fighter pilots, a couple of other naval aviators, a NASA space shuttle mechanic, a rocket-systems engineer working for Lockheed Martin and his roommate from Rice, Charles Gamiz ’97, an electrical engineer with Intel Corp. Then he approached the Rocket Racing League once more.
During an afternoon-long conference, Bridenstine and his teammates convinced the league executives that their team, though less capitalized than the others, could be a contender. He was invited to join for the first season under the proviso that the league could market him as the underdog. “Absolutely,” Bridenstine told them. “I’ll be your underdog, but only until I win the first race.”
Bridenstine’s team was the second team accepted by the league, and a third is now officially in place. Bridenstine anticipates that there will be six to 10 teams for the first season or two. “That will be enough racers in the sky to make it appealing,” he says, “while we’re working out all the technology and keeping things safe.”
The Mark-1 X-Racer
The plane that Bridenstine will be flying is called the Mark-1 X-Racer, developed by XCOR Aerospace. It has a main wing aft and a smaller wing called a canard up front. “It’s pretty futuristic,” Bridenstine says. “A prototype, called the EZ-Rocket has been flying for a couple of years. A Mark 2 Rocket-Racer is in development, and it will be able to fly longer, faster and higher, maybe even into suborbital space.”
The Mark-1 is powered by a single engine that burns a combination of liquid oxygen and kerosene to achieve nearly 1,800 pounds of thrust to propel the craft at speeds of about 350 miles per hour. “That’s not extremely fast,” Bridenstine explains, “but the limitation is not the rocket motor, which can go mach-whatever. The limitation on the airspeed is the airframe, which is very light. That’s good, but the last thing you want is for your wings to fall off because you’re going too fast.”
Winning races won’t simply be a matter of rocketing throughout the course, though. A race will last approximately 12 minutes, but the Mark-1 carries only enough fuel for four minutes of burn time. “The key to winning will be conservation of energy,” Bridenstine says. “There’s no modulation of the throttle. It’s a switch, and you’re either full on or full off. So you have to turn your rocket motor on to boost and turn it off to glide. Winning won’t be a matter of who has the best vehicle, because all the vehicles are the same. The winner will be the pilot who uses the energy most efficiently. That’s going to make for some really amazing come-from-behind finishes because there will be pilots who, although they’re leading, have not managed their energy, so they very easily could be overtaken.”
Racetrack in the Sky
The format will be structured much like NASCAR races, with a number of races taking place each year in venues around the country—or even the world—with a final championship race, the X-Prize Cup, wrapping up the season in Las Cruces, N.M. The races during the first season or two likely will take place in conjunction with auto races and air shows while the kinks are being worked out, but a producer who has produced several Olympic Games; national football, baseball and hockey games; and a number of reality television shows has pitched the concept to the major television networks, all of whom are very interested in carrying the races live. “It’s not a question of whether or not we’re going to get on television,” Bridenstine says. “It’s, who’s going to give us the best exposure and the best deal? Once we’ve established the network we’ll be racing on, we probably also will take part in a reality television show to introduce the teams and build rapport with the public before the first race occurs.”
Venues for the races have yet to be set, but whatever that arrangement is, the sport should be a spectacular experience for fans. The first season, the track will be a simple oval, about a mile long, standing on end, with the rocket planes racing up and down and around it. As the sport progresses, the track will become more complex, perhaps even resembling a giant rollercoaster in the sky, with climbs, descents, banks and turns. “Eventually, the track will be different from race to race,” Bridenstine says. “And the pilots won’t know what that track is until the day before the race, which means we won’t have an opportunity to get in our rockets and test it to see what’s the most efficient way to burn our fuel. The races are going to be based completely on pilot skills—total seat-of-the-pants flying.”
For the near-term, the tracks will remain in the atmosphere, but it’s not inconceivable that the race eventually will go higher. “The goal is that, in 10 years, we’ll race into suborbital space,” Bridenstine says. “And in 20 years, we’d want to be racing in orbits around the Earth. Very exciting to think about.”
Very exciting, especially considering the fact that the track is completely virtual. The pilots will stay on course by following a three-dimensional virtual display in their helmets that shows a string of “gates” through which they have to fly. Each pilot will have differently shaped gates—circles for one, triangles for another, squares for a third and so forth. Missing a gate will result in a penalty.
The track also will be visible, from a third-person angle, to home viewers on their television screens, but that is just the beginning. Fans who log in via the Internet will be able to use gaming software to race the actual racers in real-time, flying through their own sets of gates. And there’s more.
Each of the rocket planes will have a navigation system that calibrates the craft’s exact position, angle of flight and velocity, and all this data will be fed into computers back on the ground, which will lead to some truly astounding visual possibilities. Because the computers know all the parameters of a given craft, they can create a digital image that shows the plane, say, from a position 100 feet behind and 20 feet above the aircraft and follows it like a chase-cam. “Even more crazy,” Bridenstine says, “the digital imagery will give all the pilots a wide-angle view of what everybody is doing. And you can slew the angle, so if you’re behind a rocket, you can move to one side or another to get shots of one or more racers from that angle. This technology is phenomenal. It’s something that’s never been done before on television, and the Rocket Racing League has patented all of it, which is another reason I’m so excited about getting involved.”
The digital imagery lends a unique opportunity for a team’s corporate sponsor. “The corporate sponsor’s logo might be painted on the side of my real plane,” Bridenstine says, “but the sponsor will be able to project whatever logo it wants to on the digital image, regardless of what’s on the actual plane. And they can alter the message whenever they want, depending on what they’re trying to brand at a given time, which is an incredible benefit. This will put their brand in front of millions at a whole new level of advertising.”
The Competition
Bridenstine expects the competition to be tough. “Right now, all the pilots are military fighter pilots, and they’re certainly good,” he says. “But I can see air show pilots and even glider pilots getting into the mix.” Before he has to face them, however, he has a lot more work to do in getting a corporate sponsor on board. He’s been talking with the cities of Tulsa, Fort Worth and Houston about locating his team in one of them if they can help him lock in corporate sponsorship. “I’m willing to locate my team where my corporate sponsor either is headquartered or has a major presence,” Bridenstine says. “I want the town and the corporate sponsor to be behind me and be my base of support as I represent them in races that are going to be held all over the world.”
So far, Bridenstine has generated a lot of interest but no solid offers. But he believes sponsorship is just a matter of time. “This is huge,” he says. “Charles Lindberg won what was called the Orteig Prize by being the first to fly across the Atlantic, and that launched today’s $250 billion aviation industry. We’re trying to do the same thing with rockets. Rocket racing is going to be global. The league has had intense interest from around the world, and the opportunities are enormous. I want to be on the cutting edge of it, helping lead a new generation of space enthusiasts.”
For more information on Jim Bridenstine’s team, visit www.bridenstinerocketracing.com.
