Those of a certain age may remember the opening ceremony of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. As Rafer Johnson lit the eternal flame, a man strapped into a rocket-propelled backpack launched himself across the arena above the ticker tape and balloons, landing gracefully on the track before a TV audience of 2.5 billion.
It was a moment of triumph seeming to herald a new age in which, finally, teased for decades by Buck Rogers’ “degravity belt” and King of the Rocketmen, we’d all soon be fizzing off to work with our own personal jetpacks. Even Isaac Asimov confidently predicted that by the turn of the century, they would be “as common as a bicycle”.
So what happened? In 2018, shouldn’t we all be flying to work?
So called “rocketmen” were not entirely the work of fiction. Russian pilot Aleksandr Andreyev had been working on one as early as 1919. Germany’s second world war rocket whiz Wernher Von Braun allegedly worked on a “jet vest” for the US army after the war, which later became project Grasshopper, aiming to build a “jump belt”.
All these attempts fizzled out due to lack of funds. It wasn’t until engineer Wendell Moore’s Bell Rocket Belt was first tested in 1960 that the world witnessed a working jetpack – using a turbo jet rather than a rocket.
The US military commissioned Moore and John K Hulbert – a gas turbinespecialist – to work on the Jet Belt, or “man rocket”, for possible military use. Moore’s first problem was fuel – anything capable of producing enough thrust burned up in a flash.
Moore hit upon using hydrogen peroxide, a compound commonly used as bleach, as a fuel. Two cylinders were attached to a fibreglass frame with another of nitrogen gas. Forced on to a catalyst, this mix explodes into superheated steam, shooting through twin nozzles at 700C.
Thrust sorted, they soon encountered the human body’s natural resistance to aerial navigation. The device, which used directional thrusters controlled by hand-operated levers, was extremely tricky to stabilise.
Undaunted, Moore flew the first flights himself, but in February 1961 the belt swerved like an unattended firehose, snapped its tether and Moore fell 2.5 metres, breaking his kneecap.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
