Rocket car insurance - will it be cheap or sky high?
Could you get cheap car insurance on a rocket car? I doubt it, but there may come a time when a question regarding how your vehicle is fuelled appears on your car insurance quote form which gives four little tick boxes marked: petrol, diesel, electricity, rocket.
How great would that be - to have a rocket car parked outside your front door. And before you think this is the stuff of madness, there are scientists out there building rocket cars that will theoretically be able to travel faster than a bullet shot from a handgun.
The Bloodhound SSC (Super Sonic Car) project aims to create a new land speed record of 1,000mph. The pencil shaped car will be powered by a jet engine and a hybrid rocket (in its simplest terms) and will accelerate from 0 to 1,050mph in 40 seconds.
Project leader Richard Noble has a long association with land speed records and has said that the breaking of such records is one of the most exciting things that can be done on God's Earth.
The British Bloodhound team is largely the same as the Thrust SSC team which claimed the last record in 1997 after building the first land vehicle to break the sound barrier, and Bloodhound SSC will be driven once again by RAF Wing Commander Andy Green.
Whilst news of the first successful firing of the full size rocket that will be used on the car has hit the national newspapers, reaction by commenters has been fairly hot and cold. There are those who cannot see the validity of the project at a time when we are supposedly in a global recession with many preferring to see the money for the project better spent on medical research or funding for hospitals etc.; and then there are those who appear to have an innate inquisitory sense, who can only see the expansive adventure attached to the project.
On the Bloodhound SSC home page is the mission statement: to confront and overcome the impossible using Science, Engineering, Technology and Mathematics - motivating the next generation to deal with global 21st century challenges and there is a strong sense amongst the project participants that the record attempt is the means by which to fire the imaginations of schoolchildren so that they will take up mathematics and the sciences. This will hopefully ensure that Britain's rich heritage of engineers, architects and all persons technically minded does not dwindle and of course will mean the further development of useful technologies such as. rocket cars.
Ok, so this car is unlikely to be turned into a mass production model and, if I'm honest, I know that it is a technical marvel that will never see the tarmac of an ordinary British A road, but I still want to dream about rocket car travel whilst being safe in the knowledge that I will never have to try to find cheap car insurance for a car which can create a sonic boom.