The Northern Cape provincial adminis-tration and the management team overseeing the Bloodhound supersonic car (SSC) project have started formalising a partnership that could result in the remote Hakskeenpan, in the Kalahari Desert, emerging as a leading extreme-sports destination during land-speed-record attempts that are due to take place in 2015 and 2016.

Project director Richard Noble tells Engineer-ing News that interest in the British-led bid to break through the 1 000 mph mark (1 609 km/h) is growing both inside South Africa and abroad. He, thus, expects that thousands of enthusiasts could well converge on to the Hakskeenpan – selected for it long, flat, firm mud surface – during the Bloodhound SSC’s two operational seasons.

The first three-month operational phase is scheduled to begin in August 2015, during which former Royal Air Force fighter pilot Andy Green will seek to better his own world record of 1 228 km/h, achieved on October 15, 1997, in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, driving the Thrust SSC.

Noble says lessons derived from that first season – during which the Bloodhound SSC is likely to be put through its paces between 30 and 40 times – will then be taken back to the UK, where the rocket-powered car will be fine tuned in preparation for the main assault on the 1 000 mph goal in 2016.

The Northern Cape government and the Blood-hound team hope to convert a memorandum of understanding signed on May 29, into a formal public–private partnership agreement by the end of June. The arrangement would detail the various contractual responsibilities of the participants in helping to realise the tourism spin-offs from the venture.

For its part, the Bloodhound team will be establishing a camp capable of housing 50 people, who will be brought in to maintain both the car, as well as the desert runway. Already some 60 members of the surrounding Philandersbron, Rietfontein, Groot Mier, Klein Mier and Loubos communities have participated in helping to clear the 20-km-long, 1.5-km-wide track of any stones.

There are also plans for the building of a hanger, in which the car can be maintained and kept clean and for the development of fuel-storage depots.

For its part, the Northern Cape administration is assessing ways to improve water supply to the parched area, not only for the Bloodhound camp, but possibly also for a strong rise in tourist numbers. Accommodation options are also being assessed, although many of the enthusiasts are likely to arrive in camper vans, caravans, or with their own camping equipment.

“We think that a large number of people are going to come [over the three months] . . . but we have no idea, because there is no real precedent for this [in South Africa]. “All we can go on is that, when we broke the sound barrier way back in 1997, our website was the fifth largest in the world – bigger than all sport and bigger than all motor racing,” Noble enthuses.

He believes the interest could be similar to that which took place when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration began testing the Space Shuttle, which attracted many people who were keen to physically see developments. “We think the same might happen here, as it is not every day you can see a car break the sound barrier, with the huge supersonic booms associated with that.”

But major efforts are also being put in to ensuring that the open-data project can be viewed remotely, with telecommunications group MTN investing in five 70 m masts that will carry information and images to a hub in Upington, from where they will be “uploaded to the cloud” for those following progress on the Internet. Noble reports that the project I has already attracted a following in 220 countries.

“When Bloodhound is finished at the end of 2016, the Hakskeenpan area is going to have better mobile telecommunications than we have in London,” Noble quips.