The awe-inspiring concept was acknowledged a way back when Buck Rogers, a science fiction comic strip hero, used a rocket pack for travel in the year 1920. Time kept passing by and we christened the flying device as Rocket Belt, which is prevalently known as Jet Pack, Jet Flying Belt, Jet Belt, or Jet Vest.
You have also seen them with James Bond in the movie Thunderball. Other than the flying cars, Rocket belt is the most spectacular flying machine ever developed. Now tell me, who doesn’t want to fly like a bird with just a backpack strapped on? Let’s not waste anymore time to look at some of the brilliant birds.
Back in 1960s, a company dubbed Bell Aerosystems built a rocket pack for one person named the Bell Rocket Belt or Man-Rocket for the US Army. The credit of devising a workable rocket belt is given to Wendell Moore, an engineer with Bell Aerosystems in 1953. The concept, which worked on hydrogen peroxide as fuel, was revived in 1990s to generate manageable thrust.
The propulsion of the belt works with superheated water vapor. Nitrogen gas, which is stored in a gas cylinder, presses the hydrogen peroxide onto a catalyst that decomposes the hydrogen peroxide into a mixture of superheated steam and oxygen with a temperature of about 740 °C. The pilot of the bell Rocket belt had to vector the thrust by changing the direction of the nozzles via manual controls and to avoid the burns, he had to wear insulating clothes.
The Bell Rocket Belt kind of device has been brought into use by James Bond in the movie Thunderball and in the Lost in Space television series. This rocket belt was also seen at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984. It had the capability to get a man over 9-meter-high obstacles and get to a speed of 11 to 16 km/h. But, the flying time was limited to mere 20 seconds.
One of the most recent incarnations of the personal jetpack is called RB200 Rocket Belt, the successor to the Bell Rocket belt. It was designed and built by Brad Barker, Joe Wright and Larry Stanley of Houston, Texas, with the help of professional inventor Doug Malewicki.
The new version was made from light alloys, titanium and aluminum and composite materials, thereby increasing fuel stock and increased power. Again the flying time could not be increased to more than 30 seconds. Owing to the limited fuel shortage, it was used by Army only but after the army turned its head to missile development, the Rocket Belt project was terminated.
Under a contract with NASA, Bell developed many versions of rocket POGO for use as a means of transportation in the moon on the Apollo missions. But, they were not used owing to the risk of crash.
Instead, NASA send Rover car for the same purpose. Anyway, all the versions of POGO were demonstrated on the earth to tell the world that they worked in real. The POGO in picture has the rockets and tanks between the two pilots.
While it won’t be appropriate to put the SoloTrek XFV in the ‘Jet packs’ category but we are not going to miss it. The SoloTrek XFV (Exo-skeletal Flying Vehicle), which is a single-person VTOL aircraft was flown in late October 2000 by NASA.
Developed in a company called Millennium Jet, the SoloTrek XFV was claimed to hover for up to three hours, flying at 100km/h and traveling more than 200km by the company’s owner, Michael Moshier.
SoloTrek wass designed to run easily in and out of extremely confined areas. The company was closed in 2003 due to financial problems.
If you have been browsing the pages for rocket belts, you must have heard the name Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana (TAM). It’s one of the two companies that have made the rocket belts available for consumers. TAM claims to be the only company that has managed to produce a fully-tested rocket belt that is custom-made to pilot’s size and weight.
It runs on a hydrogen peroxide fuel and thus quite heavy (124 to 139 pounds.) The catch, a single ride lasts only 30 seconds. It won’t take you too far but a bird-like flight is all we want. The TAM Rocket Belt wants you to break into bank as its price tag reads a whopping US $250,000.
The only company that is currently a nemesis for TAM’s monopoly in this market is Jetpack International. It, too, has built its own jet packs, which are commercially available. Its Jet Pack H202 manages to fare better in terms of flight time by a whole 3 seconds.
This Jet Pack manages to fly for about 33 seconds and costs $155,000. There is a different version on the website, the Jet Pack H202-Z, which manages a flight time of 43 seconds. All thanks to its increased capacity that stands at a neat 8 gallons of H202.
The company claims that the product, which will be available on December 11, has an estimated flight time of 19 minutes and will be able to fly over a distance of 27 miles. Now that is something worth waiting for. The T73 Turbine will run on jet fuel and will be far better than what is available currently.
This very project by a guy named Andreas Petzoldt has been in the works for more than ten years. He is designing and building a turbine-powered personal flying suit dubbed Monocopter.
The turbine would strap to the back of the apparatus, and route enormous flows of hot air through four nozzles. The Monocopter would let you fly high through the skies for as much as 20 minutes on a full tank of gas.
Other than the power plant and controlling of the unit, the Monocopter is going to very much like the famed Bell Rocket Belt. If you ask me, if it meets realism, it would be the best jet pack ever developed.
Developed by Rick Herron, creator of Skywalker Jets, the Skywalker is a rocket pack that weighs about 90 pounds and can push a pilot weighing 200 pounds into the air for stimulating 5 minutes.
Well, this is just a prototype while Rick is working on a finalized model that has a range of about 4 miles along with a GPS unit to display flight time and engine info.
If it gets the real shape, the monstrous rocketeer will set you back $200,000.
This 100″ wide and 48″ tall Flying Jetpack pack is under testing currently and the site says that the flight testing will begin very soon.
The engine used for the flying jetpack is a Rotax 503 and the fuel is Premium Unleaded gasoline. It is claimed to reach the speed of 50 mph with a respectable range of 50 miles. The site says that it can carry a total weight of a 200 lb pilot and carries 3 gallons of fuel and can stay in the air for up to an hour before refueling.
Currently, they are offering the construction plans for $38.
This could be the ultimate breakthrough in the history of jet packs. California based Personal Flight Systems has got a patent for a “personal flight vehicle and system” that uses electromagnetic ionic propulsion for thrust and runs on energy broadcast wirelessly from terrestrial power stations. The jetpack will be ion-propelled and remotely powered.
The fundamental idea behind the ion propulsion is to positively charge a fluid and then electromagnetically propel it to create thrust. Such technique has already been used by NASA to propel USVs.
That’s an interesting take on the make of jet packs as you won’t need to carry of explosive fuel on your back.
Is this the future of personal travel? I doubt so. These techie birds are still too dangerous and pricey to go into massive usage. The flight time is negligible and it’s not that easy to strap jet propellant near your body. Anyhow, technology is getting more sophisticated day by day so we can surely expect mass commercialization of rocket belts with longer flight time sometime later in the future.
But, before we wrap up the things, let’s pay homage to Dan Schlund, who is one of 11 Rocketbelt Pilots, professional stuntman, actor and pyrotechnician.
