I was just at the site and couldnt find this. Is NASA providing any support for these people, tracking or ground support of any kind?
The contest specifically excludes any government sponsorship. All moneys must be private. From the website,
(Emphasis added.) Private means no NASA money or material assistance.
Now of course, most of the experience that the engineers and rocket scientists have came from working on contracts and projects directly or indirectly for the US Government, agencies like NASA, NSA, NRO, or USAF… but that’s not material assistance.
Operational Support: You can poke around the press releases, to see if the mention any NASA assistance, but I specifically recall the Rutan team instrumented their own vehicles to report their flight performance.
You can also safely bet that NORAD and the NRO are watching all these launches very closely. In my experience with private and commercial space launches, the spookier side of the US government doesn’t miss a single chance to calibrate their sensors against known equipment… those boys at the consoles are probably bored numb anyway, and wouldn’t miss a chance to track a launch I’m sure.
And if any of the contestants are using US air space or test facilities, they are going to be required to have range safety ordnance on board any unmanned components, so that if it goes off course, it can be safely destoyed in flight. And the USAF will be the ones tracking by radar and issuing the destruct commands.
And those boys are probably bored, too… so don’t let your projected point of ballistic impact stray outside the safe zone, or BOOM!
(The RSO at Vandenburg AFB has a banner over their door, “We Track 'Em, and We Crack 'Em” – they are quite proud of their job.)