Rocket Racing League

So a friend mentioned something when he was talking to me about his recent trip to look at a grad school for astronautics.  He said that they had the wing from a Rocket Racing League plane there and were using it to test wing loading.  This kind of surprised me because I had never even heard of a Rocket Racing League.  So when I got home I looked it up online, and here's some of the stuff I found.  

The promo video on the official RRL website seems overly optimistic, but awesome none the less.

http://www.rocketracingleague.com/

I would LOVE to watch a sport like that, however my practical side keeps nagging at me that this sport is highly unlikely to be successful.  

Further investigation lead me inevitably towards the wikipedia page for the league (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Racing_League ) which gave a few more details such as the types of planes being used.  The planes the league intends to use are a heavily modified descendant of the Rutan VariEze that are being assembled by XCOR with a LOX/Kero rocket built by Armadillo Aerospace.  I love looking into small aerospace companies because I frequently come across really really cool projects like this.  Both Armadillo Aerospace and XCOR have numerous other cool projects either already completed or in the works. 

I broadened my search out and dragged up some YouTube vids that demonstrate proof the XCOR plane and Armadillo rocket can and have flown, which is encouraging.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEPr3DRUS7Y

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJJT8639Weo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8ouSwCn8so

The third video is using a color additive to the fuel, because that red color in the rocket plume is not normal for buring a LOX/Kero or LOX/Ethanol mixture.  

All in all I would love to see this sport become popular, however conventional aircraft races are still fairly unpopular and that is a much safer/easier sport all around.  Maybe the extra danger and the buzz word rocket will draw additional people to the sport, but it seems like a monumental infrastructure that will be needed to support entertainment of this magnitude.  

To put it in perspective a little, could you even see someone shooting a movie like this with 8 rocket powered planes racing through courses they see on their HUDs?  I think it would cost way way to much to actually do this even for an action movie with an enormous budget, they would inevitably animate it on a computer. Unless this sport builds a huge grass roots following or has major sports sized sponsors (like Nextel NASCAR money) before it even begins I don't see the league having more than a major action movie's budget to start out with.