Here's Your Jetpack

We've got listeners and they request things. They often request things. Well, some of the things they request are impossible to talk about, right, but we do get we know. We we ask people at the end of every single episode if you have suggestions, send them in, and some folks do, and this is one of them. We're going to talk about a listener request, right. So this listener request is from someone calling himself or

herself through all right. It says, Hey, guys, I've been thinking hard on what I'd like to hear as a podcast from you guys, and finally it flew in, Like Boba fat jet packs, I think it would be interesting to hear if we ever will get to jet packs and what they will look like, as well as the jet packs. And that's in quotes the jet packs we have now, thanks your faithful listener, the lightsaber wielding hobbit ru It's a lot of mythology going on with Row.

I like it. Yeah, No, I don't like the cross pollination. So yeah, we wanted to really take a look at this. We figured this would be a fun one. One of the many things we talked about. Whenever there's a discussion about the future, someone inevitably says, where's my flying car or where's my jet pack? Those two things I think end up representing kind of our concept of what the

future should have incorporated into it more than anything else. Yeah, well, jet packs show up in a lot of media, of course, and we can talk about those in a minute, but I wanted to start with sort of the idea of jet packs before we get to the reality of ship packs. When you imagine the sci fi jet pack, the thing people are asking for when they say where's my jet pack, where's my jet pack? Where's my jet pack? What is it?

It's sort of a device that makes you a hummingbird. Sure, it's limitless, fully controllable personal flight, so you can zip through the air to your destination. At rapid speeds. You can take off and land wherever and whenever you want. You can hover in place if you need to. You can make a quick getaway if you need to. It's just total personal freedom of movement, right. And beyond that, it's it's as close as we would be able to

get to flying like a superhero as possible. Right, there's no what we wouldn't have a vehicle around us, there's no plane or car around us. It is you experiencing that credible thrill of flying. And it's one of those things that a lot of people have that desire, right, the desire to feel as if they are flying through the air. And this, I mean, that's the superpower I would go with if I couldn't have my other one, which is essentially total time control. But yeah, I would

want to fly through the airline. Well, as we've discussed before, I would choose teleportation because proper teleportation can recreate the effects of flight and many other things besides. Well, sure, but see to me, it's not just the destination, it's the journey. How romantic. Well, okay, we know that rockets slash jets exist today. We have plenty of them. We know how to make them. There are some really smart people who are good at designing them to do very

specific things. And of course backpacks exist, so one plus one should equal too. In the theory, you should be able to combine them and it should be super easy to create something like a jet pack. So where are they? Why don't we have them? What's the hold up? So the best way I thought to look into this is to kind of lay out some rules and kind of define some terms, because we're gonna use the word jet pack a lot in this episode, but a lot of the things we're going to be talking about are not

technically jets. They are rockets, and there is a difference. I knew you'd bring some annoying technicality into this. It's important because there are jet packs that are jet packs that are jet engines strapped to a person. Let's pursue the truth to the fullest extent. Well, what is a jet? Okay? So a jet is an engine that takes an air, uses a turbine to compress the air, and then pushes that compressed air mixture out and mixes it with fuel and then it combusts the fuel. So they require oxygen

to work. That oxygen comes from that air intake at the beginning. So a pure jet engine would not work in outer space because you wouldn't have the the oxidizer to mix with the fuel to allow it to combust. Right, It's sort of like I don't a sort of part rocket, part vacuum cleaner all thrust. Uh So rockets carry both the fuel and the oxidizer, the oxidizing agent together, whatever that might be. Right, that's why they can burn in

deep space. They don't need external oxygen in order to work because he's still the atmosphere of any kind, right, you still need you still need some sort of oxidizer in order to combust. That's one of those things that you know, you need heat a an oxidizer in a fuel in order for you to create any sort of fire or burn something. But if you pack the oxidizer with you, then you don't have to pull it in from the surrounding environment. So rockets end up having that

as one of the components on them. Both of them work by creating thrust. Yes, uh so there are some jet packs that are actually jet packs, they are jets. For example, um Eve's ROSSI. He was the guy who had the fixed wing jet pack. Uh, he jumped out of like a hot air balloon and flew for an incredibly long time. We'll talk about him again a little bit later in the episode, but his is actually a wingsuit that has jet engines on it, so it is a jet pack. I think that's super ironic because I've

seen people online referring to him as quote rocket man. Yeah, apparently we can't get the nomenclature right. People wearing rocket belts are wearing jet packs, and people using jets are rocketmen. Yeah, well, you know, we're silly people, I guess. So now that we've laid out some terminology, let's look at some instances of jet packs and pop culture some of the things that really promoted this idea of personal transport that allows us to fly wherever we want. And there are a

lot of examples we can point to. One is one that Rube mentioned, right, Yeah, now I have it in the notes. But did you did you already know where Boba Fett first appeared the Star Wars? I did? Are you really asking me? The Star Wars Holiday special? Now? Right now, we're in the holiday season and you might not know this about me, but if you happen to see me out somewhere, and you wish me happy holidays.

Whether you know it or not. The holiday you're referring to is Life Day, the day celebrated by the Wookies in the Star Wars Holiday Special. You actually watched the Star Wars Holiday Special. I've watched it like six or seven times. I've sat through all of the interminable sketches, two hour long variety show in the worked in the context of a Wookie family drama unfolding and without any subtitles. Um.

I find the Wookie Life Day quite inspiring. Anyway. In an animated segment on this holiday special variety show, there was the first appearance of Boba Fette, who was the bounty hunter we all know and love now, wearing the cool Mandalorian armor, sporting the weird gadget kind of weapons. He was almost kind of like an outer space James Bond. He had lots of little strange gadgets on him. Yeah. He wrote in on a big old dinosaur like thing too, So you know it's you couldn't have gone for more

dramatic entrance. Now. Of course, most people are familiar with Boba Fett from the appearances in the other movies, specifically Empire Strikes Back in Return of the Jedi, rhet coond into Star Wars um and uh, then you have Django Fet in the Clone Wars. But at any rate, that jet pack was put to good use in Return of the Jedi and bad use as well, because that was pretty much what ended up having him get swallowed by

the star Lac. Yeah. They're having a big fight on job of the Hut's barge, and I think he uses it to try to jump from one ship to the other ends up falling down in the pit. Spoiler alert if you haven't seen Return of the Jedi. As I recall, Han Solo is holding a long pole arm and he hears from Chew Bacca the words Boba fet says, Boba Fett Boa fet where and he turns and three stooges like hits Boba Fett's jet pack controls, forcing him to

fly into the star like Yeah. And I think this is interesting because surprisingly Boba Fette's jet pack depiction in the Return of the Jedi is fairly realistic because it only works in a short burst and it's apparently hard to control. Yeah. Yeah, we'll go into more of that too. Yeah. So another famous appearance of a jet pack and pop

culture is in James Bond. I loved this one when I was a kid, and I still kind of love it now because of how ridiculous and pointless it is, Like he could have just there's a scene where Sean Connery has just had I think a sword fight with somebody. He's just killed. This is a pre credit sequence, so it's the it's the the mission that James Bond was

on before, the one you're actually interested in. And he kills the bad guy and the henchman come running and so he makes, uh, he tries to make his escape from like a giant manner, right, and he uses a jet pack. You don't see him putting it on. He just kind of suddenly has it on. You see him put on the helmet, but not the jet pack, which clearly would take several minutes of coordination to get it on properly, right, And so he's trying to get off

the roof of a mansion. I always felt like, wouldn't a rope work just as well? Just kind of have a rope, But he flies out over the mansion and then lands in the street. Next to his Aston Martin and then makes us get away, conveniently stowing the jet pack into the trunk of the Aston Martin. First. Uh so that was pretty exciting. And then of course there's The Rocketeer. I never saw it. It's actually a very underrated, fun,

pulpy kind of movie. The Rocketeer is based off a comic book series that came out in the nineteen eighties that was meant as a tribute to the old science fiction serials of the thirties and forties, So it was The Rocketeer itself doesn't date all the way back there, that is, when it's set. It's set in the thirties, but the actual comic book came out in the eighties, and then the movie came out in the nineties, and um, again has a superhero who uses a rocket pack too

fly around. Although this rocket pack is phenomenal because it apparently has a nearly infinite supply of fuel. So those are the kind of the pop culture ones that I think about. I mean, they're obviously there are other ones as well, but those are the big ones that jump out at me. So we've seen all of this, we know people have thought about it. What are some of the reasons why jet packs aren't just all over the place, and one of the big ones is that, well, it's

just because the way people are. We're not aerodynamic. Yeah, we don't have wings. Yeah, we don't generate lift, and we're pretty dense. Yes, all of us, even the lighter side, are pretty dense relatively. Yeah, And uh so in order for us to fly, we have to be we have to use something that's going to generate enough lift to counteract the weight that we have. Right, we have to be able to generate more upward thrust than we have weight.

But there's a problem here because it doesn't just have to counteract your weight and the Earth's gravity tugging down on you. It has to counteract its own weight on

top of your weight exactly. So whatever jet pack, like, if I weigh, you know, eighty pounds and I've got a jet pack on that has a hundred eighty pounds thrust, well does that if that is the total weight it has, I'm not gonna be getting off the ground because it's the jet pack is not it's going to be it's you know, that weight, it's going to add to it. And plus then you have the fuel. Right, the fuel is going to add weight, and in fact, the longer you want to fly, the more fuel you have to carry.

But the more fuel you carry, the heavier your jet pack is, and that's it places more limitations. This is the same sort of issue we run into when we talk about space, the idea that the weight of stuff that we're trying to send up into space matters because that requires more fuel, and the more fuel you add, the more weight you have to the overall space delivery package. These are big issues. Also depending on the type of fuel, um, it could be fairly dangerous. Not all rocket fuels, uh

you know friendly stuff. Well, I mean, we we have seen tragic cases where rockets explode um. And it depends on what kind of fuel you use. Like you said, I mean, there's some fuels that are much safer than others. And I think typically when you're designing a jet pack, you're going to try to tend towards the safest kind of fuel you can use. But this puts limitations on

your design, right. And if you're looking at a lot of the jet packs that have come out, specifically the ones that follow one particular design, the limits on flight times are pretty pretty rough. I mean we're talking like thirty seconds of flight, and and a lot of the things I read talked about how you need to have about ten seconds of that to determine how to land safely.

So really you've got twenty seconds of lying time followed by ten seconds of Oh, I need to find a place to set down, so I don't know injure myself, um at any rate, those are some of the problems. And other one is just that jet packs are not quiet. Nope, and that's you know, it's one thing if you are a person demonstrating a technology and you've got a big group of people around watching you flight through the air.

It's another if you want to suggest this as an actual mass produced means of travel travel, Right, if you're imagining this city of the future where everybody walks out the front door in the morning, puts on a backpack, and then jets off to work, this is going to be an incredibly noisy city. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, these

are rockets or jets. They are not quiet devices. And uh, if you watch the footage of these old like tests of jet packs, various jet packs, you see a lot of people putting their fingers in their because it was it was loud, and uh, you know, you just imagine a city full of people doing that. First of all, the skies would just be roaring constantly, which would be

kind of tedious. I would think there would have to be some kind of citywide service also that you call up every time a jet pack flyer crashes on your lawn. Do you get them to come collect the corps or what do you do? I think you have your corps pushing robots, just push them out to the curb. Right, and we're talking about the amazing future. Everyone's going to have a corpse pushing robot. I can buy that. Okay, it was a little little dark, but hey, it's the holidays.

That's kind of the mindset we're into. Okay, I've got another big question about this. Though everybody says they want one, Yeah, but is anybody actually gonna pay what it would cost to make these? I think there there's going to always be a very small market for these. But that's the thing.

It's going to be a small market. I don't think it's ever going to get to a point where it's going to require mass production, which means that costs are never going to come down, So the price tag of these things is going to be very high, so the people who can afford them are going to be few in number. Right, it seems like people are imagining jet packs as a kind of transportation alternative. Instead of taking the subway or your car, you take a jet pack.

What seems more likely to me is that even as jet packs become more viable at the consumer level, they're still still going to be basically a very expensive recreational device. You can only use transportation alternative, right, because you know you can't. You know, we have such hard limitations on how much fuel you can carry, how far you can travel that uh with only a couple of exceptions of some proposals that would allow you to travel further but

would be restrictive in other ways. It just wouldn't be practical. So without those practical uses, there's not the funding necessary to go into research development. Beyond that, there's not enough interest to create a uh an industry around it. So yeah, you've got the I will constantly have people say wouldn't jet packs be cool? And yeah, but cool isn't a good enough and reason to to actually make them. It's kind of like lightsaber is actually which we talked about recently.

It seems really cool, but then can you really think of anything a lightsaber can do that you can't do with something else that's easier to make? Right now, that hasn't stopped us from actually making working jet packs, which

is different from lightsabers. If you remember our lightsaber episode, we essentially said we can't figure out how this would ever become a real thing, and then on top of that, we couldn't think of a practical application for it, apart from Lauren's suggestion that it would allow us to both slice and toast bagels at the same time. Um So

jet packs. However, we've actually got several examples of those being made, and some of them are just you know, concepts or whatever that were floated out there, no pun intended. But I just had a collection of some of the fun ones that I thought I talked about, and one that is not so so fun, but it's so crazy that I had to include it. Did you read all of these yet, Joe? Are you talking about the kidnapping? Yeah? You read that one? Yeah? Okay, back up to alright,

August night. That's when Frank R. Paul illustrated the cover of Amazing Stories, and it shows a guy wearing a jet pack. He's flying over a lady's waving to the lady las wig Hi, mr jet pack man, Uh and uh. It's one of those early depictions, like one of the earliest ones that I've seen of this idea of of a jet pack that would allow people to travel on their own. As you were saying, Joe in nineteen five, this is the sort of legendary thing you have. The

himmel Schummer. The himmel Stummer was the sky stormer hack that was supposedly developed by the Nazis during World War Two, and it was supposed to be two pulse jet tubes based off of the rocketry that the Nazis were working on at the time, one mounted to the back of a soldier that would allow for thrust, and one that would be on the front of the soldier so that would be used for steering um and this was meant to allow soldiers to jump over obstacles. This sounds like

one of those stories. I mean, is there any evidence that this actually existed? There was, there was at least some There are people out there who would who would at least no definitively if elements of this story are true, because there are no photographs that have have survived. Assuming this thing really did exist, there are no examples of the thing that I know of. Supposedly Bell got hold of the company Bell. Yeah, Bell Aerospace Labs. They they

got whole of one of these. Um supposedly, but again, unless someone there knows definitively whether that happened or not, it's kind of in the realm of legend. There are illustrations, but the illustrations are illustrations, they're not photographs. So, however, it could be said that the idea had been proposed, whether it was ever actually built in any sort of prototype, I don't know. Then you have the Hiller vs. One. Did you see a picture of one of these? I

didn't just imagine like a little round platform. It's got a railing that goes all the way around. Wait a second, yes, I did see this. The the flying platform. Yeah, it's a flying platform. It's actually a ducted fan, so it's aducted fans, got a propeller inside it that rotates. That's what generates the thrust. It's like as if you could stand at the top of a guard tower, but that guard tower could raise itself up into the sky and

come back down it will. Yeah and uh. It was built in an nineteen fifties, early nineteen fifties, and again not an actual jet pack, more of a flying platform and you would steer it by shifting your weight. In fact, I watched a film of this so well video on YouTube, but it was converted from a film where you see the guy like kind of herky jerky making this thing move to specific locations. UM. And it was a five foot fiberglass round wing that was the ducted fan part

that you stood on top of. UM and had twin counter rotating coaxial propellers inside this ducted fan, so the fan part would be under your feet and generating the thrust that would allow you to go up into the air. But it was somewhat limited. It was never never received full funding, so it never went into any kind of production. I think they built six of them, and at least one of them is on display in a museum right now. You control it by shifting your weight. Yeah, So it's

like the segue of flying vehicles. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's lean forward and that's where you're gonna go lean forward too far and bad news. Then you have the theicle jump belts. This was also developed in the nineteen fifties. Now, these weren't really jet packs. They were meant kind of like the the Himmel Stemmer uh, the ones. They were meant to help help a soldier like leap over something. Yeah,

a run really fast for a short time. Uh. And the company had developed solid fuel rockets, including rockets that we would use in an early space program projects like Jim and Jim and I and Mercury. Almost a gimin e. Well that's all I love astro not say it. They call it the Jiminy project. Yeah, Jimini cricket, Jim and I Cricket and the Jiminy Project. All right. So then the jump belt also had the nickname Grasshopper. Again, it wasn't funded beyond some early prototypes faded away. For one thing,

that loud noise problem. That becomes a real issue in military applications because obviously you don't want to give away your position to the enemy. And if you're wearing a jet strapped to you or a rocket, you're gonna be making some noise and you're not hard to find now. So then you've got windel More of Bell Aero Systems, and this is really where we start looking into jet

packs seriously. Uh. Windew More created the Bell rocket belt, which used hydrogen peroxide as rocket fuel, and that was useful because it wasn't explosive and thus was safe for a jet pack where to carry around. So you had to use kind of a chemical reaction to get the propellant to shoot out. Yeah, so it's the The device was like a imagine a three tank backpack or the tanks on the left and the right have solution of hydrogen peroxide in them. The tank in the center has

nitrogen gas and it not not liquid nitrogen. Nitrogen gas. The nitrogen gas pushes that that mixture of hydrogen peroxide through a catalyst, and the catalyst makes this chemical reaction happen where you end up getting steam. So you get water and you get oxygen also heat obviously, and that's what the steam is what would provide that thrust through It escapes through nozzles, and the nozzles are what allow you to get the thrust that would counteract your weight

and you could fly up into the air. Uh, So it worked. He built this thing. He actually tested it himself quite a few times on tethered flights and uh the design he made had a flight time limit of about twenty one seconds. Uh. Now, the first successful untethered test flight of the Bell rocket belt was in April of nineteen sixty one and was piloted by Harold Graham.

What had happened was a Moore had injured his knee and knew that he would not be able to do the untethered test flight, although it upset him greatly, so he got Harold Graham to do it. This flight lasted fourteen seconds UM and hit a top speed of six miles per hour and traveled thirty five feet untethered. So yeah, I'm I'm thinking that if I were this test pilot, my thought would be holy crap, holy crap, holy crap, poly crap, holy crap, pole thankodness Like that would be

essentially the way my thought process. I wouldn't be worried about how far I was going. I'd been thinking my feet are no longer on the ground and I've got a rocket strapped to my back. Um. So a public demonstration went a little bit uh was a little bit more spectacular Graham flew for just ten seconds, but he flew over a truck at an altitude of about fifteen feet, traveled a hundred fifty feet in distance at about ten

miles per hour. And as they were testing this out, they figured out that thing I was talking about, how it takes about ten seconds to make sure that you can land safely. So if your full flight time is twenty one seconds, and ten seconds of that needs to be taken up with you figuring out where to land, you have very You've got a real limit on how

far you can go and how high you could go safely. Anyway, Um, they actually incorporated a device into this, this jet pack, this this rocket belt, in which a little uh speaker would start beeping when you had ten seconds of fuel left. It would be inside the pilot's helmet. And I remember, I think it was I want to say it was the Verge that wrote this whole great history. There are a lot of of great histories about jet packs out

there online. The Verge has a fun one. But I said, yeah, I can only imagine that you've got a rocket strap to your back, you're flying through the air, You're trying to figure out how to land. And meanwhile, your your helmet is beeping in your ear, Like, there's got to be a better way of doing this in a low stress and kind of approach. You have nine seconds until death, right. So one of the test pilots for this bell rocket belt,

his name was is Bill Suitor. He actually, if I am not mistaken, flew a jet pack into the Olympic opening ceremonies in Ur, didn't he He He did. Yeah, he also flew the jet pack, or was one of the two pilots who flew the jet pack and thunderball. Yeah. The other one was Gordon Yeager. So they acted as sort of stunt pilots for Sean Connery. That's kind of cool too. And Bill Suitor actually has has tested lots of these kind of devices. Apparently he got a real,

uh real taste for it. And you know, the story is that he was nineteen years old and he went to his next door neighbor to see if he could get a job. His next door neighbor was Window Moore and said, well, you could test some of this stuff, and he said, okay, nineteen years old and that's how he got started. That's amazing, Yeah, and it's kind of cool. So nineteen sixty one we got another interesting entry here

Robert Corter test flies a jet flying belt. Now this was also one that windel Moore worked on before he passed passed away in nineteen sixty nine. Uh, this flying belt had a w R nineteen fan jet engine from Williams International. So this was actually a jet pack. If you look at a picture of this, it looks like a guy with a jet engine strapped to his back and that and with a couple of handles coming out and that's it. I mean, it looks like he's just

wearing a jet engine. Um, so less like a jet pack like Boba fette and more like alright, imagine taking a jet engine off an aircraft and strapping it to someone. That's kind of what this looks like. We've all done that at one time or another. You know, we've all had are We all have our pasts. So here comes the crazy story. And this this is a dark, crazy story that we don't even have all the information on, but it was one that I thought I needed to

include because it was just so bizarre. In nineteen two, Brad Barker partners with two guys, Joe Wright and Larry Stanley to build a new get belt based off of Wendell Moore's design, but this one was supposed to have lighter components, is supposed to have greater fuel capacity, so it was supposed to allow for longer flying times than the previous ones. So they even got Bill Suitor to come in and test fly the model they built. They call it the RB two thousand. Now here's where the

story gets weird. Barker and Stanley had some sort of disagreement. One story I read was that Stanley thought that Barker and Wright were, uh, we're conspiring to essentially steal money because Stanley was the guy who fronted most of the money for the development of this jet pack. And the argument got heated and Barker at one point grabbed a rubber mallet and started hitting Stanley with it. Uh So Stanley press charges. Barker was arrested for assault. He got

two years probation. Uh. Stanley one ownership of the RB two thousand rocket belt. So he goes to claim the device from Barker's auto shop and it's not there, and neither is Barker. What Yeah, So then later then this is taking course over years by the way. Stanley then goes to track down Joe Right, the other partner. Joe Wright, turns up dead beaten so badly they had to identify him from his dental records. Yeah. No, unsolved. They the police said, we don't have enough information to to uh

too to charge any suspect with this crime. Uh. So Stanley finally finds Barker and takes him to court and wins a ten million dollar reward from the judge, but Barker refuses to pay, so Stanley allegedly grabs Barker, shoves him in a box, and holds him for eight days until Barker manages to escape. Uh. Police then arrested Stanley on kidnapping charges. He was sent to life in prison gut, I think eight years instead. Uh. And then the kicker of this is the RB two thousand jet pack itself

is lost. No one knows where it is, or at least no one's saying did anybody ever actually see it? I'm wondering did soon did he? So? Yeah, a really weird story. And I tried to follow up on this to see what other information I could find, but it was pretty much that And it was just crazy. The more I read about the more I thought this needs to be a movie. Someone needs to make a movie about this story, because it's kind of like a Cohen Brothers kind of story about the jet pack gone wrong. No,

I could totally see the Cohen Brothers doing this. But at any rate, let's talk about some more updated jet packs. Uh, you know that was that was kind of a look back through the history of it. But we've actually got some examples we can point to today. Yeah. Well, a lot of what we've been talking about has been terrestrial. Like you're standing on the surface of the Earth and you want to fly, you know, because you think that'd

be cool. Yeah, So you launch off the ground, you fly for a eleven seconds or whatever it is, and then that you get the message you need to land immediately. You do, and it's the thrill of the lifetime. But what about in space, where we really do have back mounted propulsion systems that are very important for things that for example, when astronauts are working outside the International Space Station. Yeah, what's interesting to me about this is how infrequently they

were used. Because I remember seeing, like again in movies, even in gravity, the George Clooney character has a backpack that allows him to jet around, which he does like in a very cavalier style to the point where you're thinking, you're wasting a lot of resources, buddy. At any rate, um, they actually weren't used that frequently, but they did come

in very handy. They were created for extra vehicular activities or e v a s, the space walks, that kind of thing, and an early one was the Manned Maneuvering Unit or m m U. I was developed by NASA in the nineties for the Space Shuttle missions, and it was a descendant of a program that the Air Force started called Astronaut Maneuvering Unit. It was something that they had built for the Gemini program, but they never got

a chance to actually use it. The one time they were going to test it, uh, the astronaut in charge was sweating so profusely just from working in the confines of the Gemini capsule that his his helmet was fogging over. So they canceled the spacewalk and that was going to be the test of the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit. As it turns out, they never got a chance to test it. But the that did end up evolving more or less into the M m U further down the road, so

it was used in only three Space Shuttle missions. It was that was the only time they used it because NASA eventually determined that there were other means of either securing astronauts to whatever they were working too, so they didn't have to worry about floating off into space, or they would um use robotics like a robotic arm to

move things into position rather than someone jetting out there. Yeah, referring to those alternative means, I think kind of like the James Bond example I gave earlier, this may be a situation where a rope is more useful than a jet pack. Yeah, exactly. Now, they did develop the Simplified AID for e V A Rescue or SAFER, which is kind of a slim down version of the m m U. It's much smaller, has less fuel in it. It's really

only there in the case of an emergency. So let's say that you're an astronaut and their tether for whatever reason, isn't secure. This would allow another restaurant to go retrieve the first one before disaster. Right, So it's they do have these, but they said this is weird because technology we've developed that we hope we never have to use. It's it's the thing that you make that you hope

you never actually have to put into use. As for other terrestrial jet packs, there are some other ones we can point to with varying levels of success and funding. There's one that a company called jet Machines extreme company I should say in organization, I guess. They created a project called the jet Vest and they claimed it was the going to be the world's smallest jet turbine flying belt.

So this is actually a jet pack, not a rocket belt. Um. How long would go three or four minutes, So the idea being that it would be much more efficient than the hydrogen peroxide based units. Um. They held a kick story campaign in two thousand twelve to try and raise thirty dollars in funding. And here's the crazy thing. You would think people are going to donate millions. Yeah, I mean you look at something like the Oculus Rift or the Pebble Watch and how many people funded that, and

you would think, oh, well, jet pack. Clearly that had to blow the thirty thou dollar campaign goal out of the water. No, it didn't even hit two thousand dollars. Now, that was two thousand twelve. Maybe if they had launched it a year later or in two thousand and fourteen, they might have met with different different amount of success.

But it did not fund and when I went to their website, they had not really updated it since then, had still had a link to that Kickstarter campaign, So I'm not sure if they're still active or not they have like a really really bad fundraising video or something that's okay, I mean it was it was obviously guys who were enthusiasts and engineers, but you know, they weren't necessarily on camera hosts or anything. But it was a fairly succinct description of what they were trying to accomplish

and what. You know, how they had even broken out where the money was going to go, like they said, you know, here's specifically what we want that money for, um because we've been this project so far has been coming directly from our pockets, and we can't afford to keep going without extra money. I guess sometimes it's just hard to understand why some projects. Yeah, I don't know.

It may have just been that this was one of those that didn't get widely enough spread for people to support it, or it could be that again, people say they want jet packs, but when it comes down to putting their money on the line, they don't really want him. Right. Well, there's still several companies that do make jet packs, some of which you can actually purchase from That include t Am Tam. There's also one called go Fast, and there's

one called Thunderbolt Arrow Systems, among others. Uh. And we mentioned Eve's Rossie who used his wing jet pack in two thousand six. He leapt out of a hot air balloon win to free fall, started up his engines, and flew for more than six minutes before activating his parachute to land. But he says he doesn't have any plans to market the jet pack. He did say he was playing on testing it several more times. But like the

Iron Man suit, right, this one's for me. Um. There's also the Martin jet Pack, which is marketed as quote the world's first practical jet pack. It's adducted fan approach. So this goes back to that that platform I was talking about. Yeah, Yeah, same sort of thing. It uses ducted fans and propellers to generate the thrust, a pair of them in this case. And um, it's got a range of thirty kilometers or thirty minutes flight time, and

it runs on gasoline as fuel. So because you're you're powering a fan, you're not you're not generating thrust using a rocket fuel or anything like that. Um. Of course gasoline obviously has its own, uh safety issues. But still and then there's another type of jet pack that we wanted to talk about, and you did a lot of the research on this. This was the jet lev Flyer, which,

believe it or not, is a water powered jet pack. Yeah, if you've ever been to one of those like super popular water resort destinations, you may have seen someone using one of these. Obviously, never been to one of these, you need to go to Camcoony. Uh I guess if a jet ski is a jet this in some sense really is a jet pack and it's not certainly not

a rocket Okay, So picture this. You put on a bathing suit and your sun screening, your pool shoes, and you get your sunglasses with a little dingle dangle around your necks so they don't fall up down in the water strap on a backpack. It's got kind of a y shaped pipe on your back going up behind your head and sort of following the contours of your shoulders, and then the ends of the two arms of that y shape turned downward towards your feet with two nozzles

that spray water at an enormous rate. And it looks basically like you've got to fire hoses strapped to your back spraying toward the ground, okay, and they spray enough water with enough force to lift your body up off of the surface of the water. There is a disclaimer in the promo video I watched that said every time it showed somebody like landing on a dock or getting off of a dock, and said, doc, takeoff and landing

are high risk maneuvers, expert training required. Yeah. I think I would only trust myself to rise up out of the water and crash back into it. Um. I've looked into this a little bit. There were some other interesting things in it, like they you know, the thrust control is one thing. The thrust is what determines how high up you're gonna go. Obviously you're you're limited because this

is tethered. It's a tethered system. The water is coming from the body of water you are in right well, so it is not just uh so it has a hose coming out the back of it. And the hose doesn't just go into the water, It attaches to a large machine that travels around in the water below. Yeah, the machine floats on top of the water, and it is what It provides the suction for the water and

the power for the thrust. In other words, all the heavy parts, the engine and and things like that are located on the surface of the water, which then means the jet pack itself doesn't have to have to provide that kind of thrust to counteract that weight. That weight is already taken care of. It's just floating on the water below you. So it has an advantage over other

jet backs. It doesn't have to carry its engine with it. Now, you can't obviously fly beyond the length of that hose from the platform, nor would you really want to, I don't think, But but it is it does allow you to actually fly over the surface of the water. Um, it's kind of cool. Uh, you know. I've I've looked at it online. I've watched a lot of videos of people using this stuff, and I keep thinking I would I want to do this, But I have a feeling I lack the basic balance to be able to do

it without becoming a hilarious YouTube video. Well, just don't try any of those doc takeoff or landing maneuvers. I think I'd be more worried about taking a header right into like someone else's boat or something. Right are you accidentally go into shallow water land up on the shore.

So I think it has about a ten meter maximum height, And based on their website, it looked like you could also you could buy sort of a jet pack add on kit for your jet ski, for your existing jet ski that would turn your jet ski into the base of a jet pack. Pretty cool. Yeah, according to their marketing materials quote, you don't only buy a jet pack add on kit, you will buy a new way of happiness.

I'm so glad because all my old ways of happiness or uh but yeah, no, this was a fun thing to talk about and and you know, I think ultimately we have to go back to those early challenges and talk about how jet packs. While they are a cool idea and they definitely represent this this notion of freedom and exhilaration that is very compelling, the jet packs themselves are not compelling enough to overcome the massive challenges that lie between them and making it a commonplace reality for

for the average person. Yeah. I think there is just not enough real actual consumer demand for this too to make them all they could be. Yeah, that's the bottom line. There's not enough reason to invest in developing consumer jet packs, not even getting to the issue of safety, right, which I mean if everybody really did have jet packs, I

wouldn't want to live in that place. Yeah. I shared a video from the British comedy series that Mitchell and web Look, which is a sketch comedy show, and one of the sketches they did was a news reporter covering the the successful launch of a jet pack company, and through the entire interview, you just here and see people flying by out of control, like just screaming as they careen around, and I think, yeah, you know, that's pretty

much how I imagine. I'm going to keep in mind that if you ever sho these videos of people using actual jet packs, essentially they take off from a standing position, remain in that standing position as they go up or down, move forward or left or right, so you're just you're standing up. You're never in that Superman prone position, you know, where you can fly horizontally over the ground. You're yeah,

you would have to have something to counteract. I guess you could do it very briefly, right, you would start falling immediately because you don't generate lift that way. You know, you would have to so in order for you to stay up, you have to have the nozzles pointing back down towards the ground. And you're not moving that quickly. You're not moving very far. You can't go that high,

at least not without really risking some possible major problems. So, yeah, there there are a lot of that's the that's the little tagline on the commercial possible major problems I could say injury or death, I guess. Uh. And ultimately, you never know when you're suit of a jet pack is going to get you beaten around the head with a rubber mallet. I mean, it's it's got a lot of dangers associated with it, something that you wouldn't even imagine

at first. Well, where I can say that jet packs do seem to be very useful is going to be in space travel largely. I can see them not just for E V A, on the I S S. Like in case your tether comes unhooked, you can jet back to the to the airlock, but also say on the surface of other planets. I can see that, especially maybe planets or asteroids that have reduced gravity, where there you could get more bang for your buck in terms of

the fuel you're carrying. Well, sure, especially if you're thinking about your your working within the confines of a space suit of some sort, which is already going to restrict your ability to move freely. So it may mean that you need something like that in order for you to to navigate the landscape around you. So yeah, I can see that being a useful, um, you know, a useful tool in those situations, just not your average Joe like

you heading for work. If I see you head to the office wearing a jet pack, I'm going to be both impressed and terrified. So just long for you to keep in mind, if you want to, I would only come to work with one of those water jet packs. Just dragging button behind you is just one of those things, just dragging on the ground, just that you can hear clattering up the steps. Yeah, that might not be the best best use of your time and resources, but who am I to say so? Guys, that wraps up this

episode of forward thinking. If you have any suggestions for future topics, let us know. Send us an email. Our address is f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Google Plus, Twitter or Facebook. At Google Plus and Twitter, we are f W Thinking. Just search fw thinking in Facebook will pop right up. Leave us a message, and you'll hear from us again

really soon. For more on this topic and the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places