Rocket Racing Team Withdraws from League

A poster for Leading Edge, the first team to join the Rocket Racing League. F-16 pilots Robert 'Bobaloo' Rickham and Don 'Dagger' Grantham, Jr. founded the Leading Edge Rocket Racing team in early 2006. (Image credit: RRL/Leading Edge.)

This story was updated at 5:03 p.m. EDT.

The firstteam to join the growing Rocket Racing League (RRL) has pulled out of thehigh-flying venture, citing fundamental differences.

"Afterworking with [the] Rocket Racing League for the past 17 months, we haveconcluded that our vision, business practices, and communications standards areincompatible with those of the league," Robert Rickard, Leading Edge presidentand CEO, said in a statement. "We had very high hopes for this enterprise andtried very hard to find a common way forward."

Formedin 2005 by Ansari X Prize founder Peter Diamandis and auto racing teamveteran Granger Whitelaw, the Rocket Racing League is intended to provideNASCAR-like races in the skies above Las Cruces, New Mexico using piloted Mark1 X-Racer rockets. The rocket racers are based on the EZ-Rocket designdeveloped by the firm XCOR Aerospace in Mojave, California and are slated tomake their competitive debut later this year.

Rickard andDon "Dagger" Grantham, both of Phoenix, Arizona, announced their Leading Edgeteam in January 2006. Both men are experienced pilots and fly F-16 jets for theU.S. Air Force reserves.

"There hasn'tbeen a working relationship between our company and the RRL for some time now,"Grantham said in the statement. "This announcement makes it official so we canmove on."

"They arewelcome to race in the league when they are properly structured,funded and in accordance with our rules and regulations," Whitelaw said of the Leading Edge team.

VIDEO: The Rocket Racing League
XCOR Pursues Dream a Step at a Time
Special Report: The New Space Race

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

Tariq is the award-winning Editor-in-Chief of Space.com and joined the team in 2001. He covers human spaceflight, as well as skywatching and entertainment. He became Space.com's Editor-in-Chief in 2019. Before joining Space.com, Tariq was a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times covering education and city beats in La Habra, Fullerton and Huntington Beach. He's a recipient of the 2022 Harry Kolcum Award for excellence in space reporting and the 2025 Space Pioneer Award from the National Space Society. He is an Eagle Scout and Space Camp alum with journalism degrees from the USC and NYU. You can find Tariq at Space.com and as the co-host to the This Week In Space podcast on the TWiT network. To see his latest project, you can follow Tariq on Twitter @tariqjmalik.