Put on Your Jetpacks and Let's Fly!

artificially intelligent computers or robots. I think about meals and pill form because you know, I was a kid of the seventies and eighties, and that was, for some reason, the concept of how we were all going to survive in the future was have these these meals that would just be in a pill and uh, if you're really lucky, you turn into a giant blueberry. But I also would think of something else that's going to be the subject

for today's episode, jet pack x Uh. I've talked about flying cars in the past, so that's off the table. But jet packs are totally something I can tackle. They are prominent in pop culture, and there are a few real world examples of jet packs or variations on the theme. In some cases it's not a jet pack. It might be more like a jet hoverboard, and in some cases it might be more of a rocket pack than a

jet pack. But we're going to cover all of that today, uh, and I want to talk about some of the gadgets, how they work, and what their limitations are, and also explain why I think jet packs will never become a real consumer technology. Now, first, let's define a few things. I'm going to talk about several different types of technology today that tend to get lumped under the general category of jet pack. But as I said, not all of

them use jet engine technology. Some of them are more like rocket packs rocket belts because they use a type of combustible fuel to generate thrust. And at least one of the ones I want to talk about isn't a pack at all. It's a platform you would stand on, kind of like a quad copter or a drone, but souped up to the point where it's powerful enough to carry a human being standing on top of it, and all of it I think can kind of sort of be generously lumped under the term jet pack, even in

though in some cases you're not wearing a pack at all. Now, the concept of strapping jets or rockets to your back so that you can achieve flight is pretty old. In the October second issue of Scientific American, all the way back in nineteen o nine, there was a piece that was written by a guy named John Elfrith Watkins, and it relayed the story of a supposed ancient Chinese astronaut.

In his story, this astronaut's name was Wong two. Watkins said that according to legend, Wong to set upon a chair moult to do on a platform and attached to that platform where forty seven rockets. Forty seven attendants lit these rockets which were meant to all ignite simultaneously and lift Wong two to the heavens in a glorious demonstration for the Emperor of China. But Watkins explained, one of those rockets exploded and the explosion badly burned Wong too.

On top of that, the Chinese emperor was quite unhappy about the whole thing, And supposedly this event happened all the way back in two thousand b c. E. Now, there's a very good chance that this whole piece was just a tongue in cheek take on the idea and a figment of watkins imagination that it was not meant to actually relay a real Chinese legend, but it's still meant. You've got a precursor to jet packs described in a

nineteen o nine periodical, which is still fairly early. In nineteen forty five, Herbert s. Zem would tell a very similar story to Watkins, except in his story the protagonist was named Wan Who, and it took place in the sixteenth century Common era, so well nearly three thousand, what three thousand, six hundred years later it was crazy. In any case, we still think the story is probably bunk and was invented in the twentieth century, not an ancient

or medieval China. Also, this was one of the stories that would later be tested on the series MythBusters, where they would attempt to create a rocket powered chair and things went about as well as you would expect. So if you haven't seen that episode, you should probably dig it up see if you can watch and see what happens when someone tries to light a whole bunch of rockets mounted underneath the chair. Now, between the accounts of Wong two in nineteen o nine and Wan Who in

nineteen forty five falls. Another early depiction of jet packs, and this was an illustration on the cover of the short story periodical Amazing Stories. And man, did I love Amazing Stories. Not that I was around when it was first being published, but I've read several of the stories that were that were originally published in Amazing Stories. And I even enjoyed to some extent the television series that was inspired by it, the TV series that was produced

by Steven Spielberg in the nineteen eighties. Uh, if you've ever had a chance to watch it, it's pretty terrible, but I still enjoyed it anyway. Frank R. Paul created the illustration for the cover of that issue of Amazing Stories, and there is a man wearing a jet pack flying around. He's got a hand hold control, uh, the handheld control rather, and it's tethered to his harness, So it's clearly the

control for the jet pack. There's no visible signs of what is creating the levitation effect, like there's no exhaust or any other designs of what might be creating the thrust. So it's not clear what Paul had in my mind that would keep this guy up there, but it is an evocative image, and it's it's certainly illustrating a certain sense of wonder that a lot of people have had at the thought of soaring through the skies without you know,

a plane around you. Now. In that issue of Amazing Stories, there was also a tale titled Armageddon twenty four nineteen a d and it featured a protagonist called Anthony Rogers, or Buck to his friends. The world of Buck Rogers featured many science fiction technologies, including those that ran on the fictional substance inner Ton or inner Ton if you prefer I N E R T O N. This was

supposedly the densest substance in the universe. It was completely fictional for the purposes of the story, and the author Philip Nolan, described how that particular substance would allow scientists

to create magnificent technologies, including a belt. I would allow you to adjust the effect that gravity would have on yourself, so you could reduce the effects of gravity to the point where you could, you know, kind of kind of float around a little bit, and if you paired it with some rockets, you could even fly, or at least float with some sort of sense of direction. As for working devices in the real world. One of the earliest

supposed jet pack precursors was the himmel Stummer. Now, this was a mythical flight pack that supposedly was created by Nazi scientists during World War Two, and it has been widely reported as being an actual thing, but I'm here to tell you that's likely not to be the case anyway.

Himil Schemer literally means sky stormer or heaven stormer, and legend would have you believe that the himmel Schemer jet pack used what's called a pulse engine, which is a real thing, and actually it was supposedly using multiple jet pulse and and that these would create enough thrust for a soldier to make a really powerful leap, so they wouldn't really fly so much as they would jump really high and really far, kind of like how Superman originally

couldn't fly, but he could leap tall buildings in a single bound. It's true, like the original Superman didn't fly around, he just jumped around a lot. Well we're talking jumps that would be around a hundred eighty feet in length and fifty feet high, so it's pretty spectacular. And supposedly it would allow soldiers to clear entire mine fields or

other obstacles. But as the story goes, the war ended before any of these left the prototype phase and got deployed in the field, and that the units that were created were either destroyed or, as French theory advocates argue, they were confiscated by the United States as part of Operation paper Clip. Operation paper Clip was this super secret,

real operation that the US had. This part is absolutely true, where they brought over science and scientists from the Nazi Germany area and put them to work for the United States. So a lot of the early rocketry program in the US was courtesy of scientists who had previously been working for the Nazis, So that part has some truth to it, although there's no evidence that the himmel Schemmer was ever

part of this real operation. Now, supposedly these engines would burn at temperatures low enough that soldiers would not need special protective clothing. Only here's the thing, like I said, there is no evidence that any of this ever existed, that any jet packs were ever made. There are no photographs, there's no documentation, and you know, it's impossible to prove

a negative. It's impossible to say there's absolutely no way these existed, because you know, what you have to do is find evidence to actually support the existence, but there's no such evidence around. There are photos of a soldier supposedly using the heimmel Strmer jet pack, but those are just of a toy model that was photoshop to look like it was a vintage photograph circa ninety four. If you look at the original picture, it's a full color picture of a toy with some rockets strap to it.

The earliest account of any sort of jet pack attributed to the Nazis appears to be from a book titled German Secret Weapons and Wonder Weapons of World War Two, which was written in nineteen seventy six, and it was written by a guy who was essentially a Nazi sympathizer living in Toronto, Canada, so not exactly an unbiased source, and as far as we can tell, it was the first and only appearance of well first appearance of this jet pack idea that nothing predated that, and the same

author wrote lots of other stuff, including some Holocaust denial uh literature, which is pretty awful, so devinly not a reliable source. However, you'll find information on the Internet that treats it like the Himmel Schemer was definitely a gadget that existed in history, despite the fact that there is no evidence that such a thing happened, and the person who who first started sharing the story has no credibility whatsoever.

The first personal flying device, a real note that actually did exist that I can really talk about it is probably the Hiller VZ one, which was built in the early nineteen fifties, And this was not a jet pack, but rather a platform upon which the pilot would stand, so kind of similar to that that apocryphal Chinese legend

in a way, except it wasn't powered by rockets. It was powered by an enormous ducted fan that had a pair of counter rotating coaxial propellers to generate the thrust needed to lift the whole thing, pilot and all off the ground, and to steer it you actually had to shift your weight, which, as it turns out, is not the most precise way to conduct maneuvers. And some folks in the Navy had a real fun little nickname for this setup, and they called it the flying pie pan.

A December nine issue of Popular Science described some other real world attempts at jet pack technology, or at least ancestors to jet packs. These were rocket belts also known as jump belts, so like the fictional Himmel Schemer, the concept was these belts would use rocket power to give a boost to a soldier needing to clear an obstacle

or jump over hazardous terrain. There were some that were created by the thecal Chemical Corporation Theicle and I'm probably mispronouncing their name, it's th h I O K O L. They created the coal jump belts. Uh. These were solid fuel rockets strapped to a belt. Uh. There is include rockets that would be part of the early Space program projects like Gemini and Mercury or Jiminy. If you prefer I do not. I prefer Gemini. But the jump belt

ended up earning a nickname called Grasshopper. The whole idea being that again gives a boost to someone who's trying to jump over, say, an obstacle. But the project never received any funding beyond some early prototypes, so it ultimately ended up fading away. It did not go beyond the prototype phase. And then there was the flying belt from Reaction Motors, which was detailed in that same issue of popular Science that talked about the vehicle jump belts. Uh.

This prototype look like an actual jet pack. It included thrusters that you would then extend to either side, so they kind of would go behind and uh and beyond your shoulders and stick out to the sides a little bit pointing downward, obviously, And it also had a couple of large canisters on the back and or to hold

the fuel, because you need fuel to use. These rocket thrusters had a hand control that was mounted by an arm to the jet pack harness, so it kind of came up over one shoulder and then the arm came down so that the handle would be right at arm level and you would be able to use that to control, say, the throttle. But this was a model of the concept in Popular Science. It was just a kind of a mock up, and it wasn't indicative of an actual working

jet pack. In fact, the piece said that we were at least a couple of years away from a working one that would allow you to fly several miles. As it turns out, it would take three years before we had a working jet pack, and the first one, i'll let you go a couple of feet, uh, turns out, if you're gonna strap rocket steer back, you tend to be a little cautious the first time you take it

out for a spin. Now, before I jump into the jet packs, that really worked figuratively speaking, um, not really going to jump into any jet packs at all in this episode, sad to say, Let's talk about the problems the jet pack has to overcome in order to allow a human being to take flight in the first place. And these are not trivial problems. The first is that we've got this pesky concept called gravity, and we've got to deal with that. Gravity is one of the four

fundamental forces of the universe. It's the weakest of the four. A's the one that we aren't really able to incorporate into our standard model in a way that makes nice clear sense. The other three fundamental forces are the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, and electromagnetism. Gravity is the force that describes the attraction between any two objects that have mass, and I'm talking about any two objects

in the universe. That's the interesting thing about gravity, because technically speaking, you have a gravitational pull on everything else in the universe around you that has mass, But gravity is a force dependent upon two things, the mass of the two respective objects, and then the distance between them. The formula to determine the gravitational attraction between any two objects goes like this. First, you take the mass of

the two object x, and you multiply those figures together. So, if you're talking about two people, you've been taking the mass of two people and multiplying that together and you get a figure. Next, you would divide that number by the distance between the two masses squared. So if the two people are a thousand kilometers apart, you would take

a thousand kilometers and you would square that. You would then divide the product of the two masses by that, and that that a result you've got, which I think would be what one million kilometers. That's so you end up with a very small number. Uh So, the this part of the formula already tells us that the greater the distance between the two masses, the smaller the gravitational

effect is going to be between them. Finally, there's a gravitational constant that you have to multiply against this number. This was determined by Newton's law of universal gravitation, and the constant in case you're curious, is six point six seven four times ten to the minus a leventh power meters cubed per kilogram per second squared. Now, the important thing to remember is you need this constant to make

the math work out properly. We're not going to go into greater detail of where this constant came from because it gets super complicated, but we multiply this times the result we got before, and what you end up with is a figure that describes the force of gravitational attraction between those two masses. So for relatively small masses, this attraction is so weak that we can ignore it. So while it is true that I have a gravitational pull on all of you listening right now, it's so weak

that you can just ignore that. It's it's the gravitational pull to a pencil that is close to you is greater than the gravitational pull I have on you, unless you're sitting really really close to me right now, in which case back off, man. I'm a scientist. But if one of those masses is considerably large and the distance is relatively small between the two masses, that gravitational attraction can be significant, such as the attraction between Earth, and

you know people on Earth. Now we're gonna talk more about gravity and how we can overcome it in just a second. But before I do that, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So, here on Earth, the acceleration of gravity is nine point eight meters per second per second. At least that's the value of the acceleration of gravity at sea level here on Earth. Because remember I talked about how the force of gravity is

dependent upon partly upon the distance between two centers of mass. Uh, Since that magnitude depends upon that distance, the acceleration of gravity decreases as you climb in elevation. It's actually lower. But for most practical applications, it's fine to say nine point eight meters per second per second, because the difference is for again, for most practical applications are so small as to not really be that that important. They're not going to make a world of difference for what we're

talking about. So if you want to slip the surly bonds of Earth and dance the skies on laughter, silvered wings points to whomever can tell me what that's a reference to. You need to create enough force to counteract the gravitational pull you experience here on the ground. So you need something has a good thrust to weight ratio, meaning you need a mechanism that can provide enough thrust downwards to nullify the effects of gravity and allow you

to climb into the air. This ratio has to be greater than one, and it means that the thrust must be more than the mass of the object you want to send into the air, namely, you plus your jet pack multiplied by nine point eight one. Now, let's complicate things a little bit. In popular culture, you'll see characters use jetbacks to do amazing aerobatics and maneuvers. Characters like the Rocketeer can fly like a bullet to another location,

kind of like Superman. This, unfortunately, is not realistic, and that's because we humans don't have bodies that can really generate lift. Now, for aircraft, lift is the force that opposes the weight of an airplane or a helicopter. Clearly, they're not shooting any kind of thrust straight down in order to maintain height, unless it's a vt O L. Helicopter kind of is, but an airplane's not. So. For

a plane, the wings generate the bulk of lift. Although the entire body is responsible for lift, it's the wings that have the majority of this. And this is an aerodynamic force is dependent upon the atmosphere. If we didn't have an atmosphere, lift would not be a factor. You wouldn't be able to fly. So this is one of the reasons why places like Mars, which has a very thin atmosphere, it would be very difficult to fly through mars atmosphere just because there's not a whole lot of

density there. Now Earth has a nice dense atmosphere. Flight means you're flying through a fluid because the gas typically is described as fluid. We would say fluid dynamics play apart here. Lift is directed perpendicular to the flow direction. So think of an airplane wing. UH an airplane wing as it's flying through the air, the flow of atmosphere is across the wing, both above and below it. The direction of lift is up. It's a ninety degree angle

from the flow direction. Lift is generated when a fluid is turned by a solid object, and lift is a force that's in opposite direction to that turn. Now, this is in line with Newton's third law of action and reaction. There has to be a motion between the object and the fluid. So in other words, the wing has to travel at a different speed than the air it's moving through.

If you had incredibly strong winds, I mean, like super strong blowing in the same direction as a plane that's trying to take off, the plane would not be able to get off the ground because the air and the wings would be moving at the same speed. You have to have a difference in velocity in order to generate lift. Now, to go deeply into the concept of lift would require a discussion of the work of Danielle Bernowley and Isaac Newton, and it would take a long time because there are

a lot of misconceptions about lift. There are a lot of of uh hypotheses that have been talked about that are kind of correct but not really correct, and it just that's a whole episode on itself. So let's just cut to the chase. The human body does not have a shape conducive to generating lift, So to stay up in the air, you have to consistently apply thrust downwards to counteract gravity. You can't just turn the thrusters directly behind you and then shoot off into the distance. Otherwise

you would just come crashing down. The only way you could avoid this is if you were moving forward fast enough so that as you fall, you're falling at the same rate as the Earth's surface is curving away from you. Because you're moving forward that fast. Uh, the Earth is a sphere. Just news flashed any out there who were not aware of this, So you'd have to be going wicked fast. You'd have to be going just as fast as the Earth is falling away from you. There's actually

a name for this particular type of falling. It's called orbit. But there's no way you would ever achieve a speed that incredible using a jet pack. And still, you know, keep all your skin on you. So even if you had an incredible jet pack in the classic design we all think of, you would not be able to fly like Superman, because you would steadily fall to the Earth until you crashed or you managed to maneuver to apply your thrust to counteract gravity. So, in other words, you're

back in a standing position. If you watched people use various types of jet packs, you've probably seen people in more or less this upright position, almost as if they are standing on solid ground and moving slowly around that way, and the limitations around lift are the reason for this. Now, there are exceptions. There are wings suits that incorporate a jet pack or rocket pack design that can provide lift

due to their designs. Uh. These are like souped up hang gliders almost, and that's a little bit different than the jet packs, say Moba set wears in the Star Wars series. But there are people who have pulled off some amazing stunts using jet packs with a wing design, so we'll get to those a little bit later. Now, another big limitation with jet packs is where they get the energy to create all that thrust. Jet Packs need

fuel or potentially some other energy source like batteries. But honestly, to get the power they need, fuel tends to be the way, so fuel or batteries doesn't really matter. That represents more weight, so that adds to the overall weight that you need to get off the ground. This is the sort of stuff that rocket scientists deal with all the time. It's one thing to calculate the thrust you need to get an empty rocket off the launchpad, but then you start adding that fuel in there, and suddenly

the rocket is much heavier. It's not just the rocket, is the rocket plus the fuel. That means you have to have even more thrust to lift the full rocket

filled up completely with fuel. While a human being obviously ways significantly less than a rocket, you still have to factor in things like fuel weight or battery weight when calculating the amount of thrust you'll need to get someone airborne, and you want enough thrust to have a nice, smooth lunch rather than you know, shooting someone off dozens of feet into the air with little warning. At least I hope that's what you want. Finding a good balance between

fuel weight and flight time is also tricky. For a long time, a lot of jet packs had a maximum flight time of around thirty seconds maybe a minute, which isn't really that great, but it's because a longer flight time would require more fuel, which again, as we know, adds more weight, which means you need more powerful thrusters which are going to burn fuel through fuel faster, and

so you can keep chasing these equations. Now these days, you can find jet packs that have a much longer flight time, up to maybe ten or twelve minutes, which is pretty impressive considering that before the maximum was about thirty seconds. It's still not a long time to be able to fly around, but it's much better than it used to be. So if you're using a device that consumes fuel, then the safety of that fuel also becomes a big concern. After all, we get energy from fuel

by burning it, you know, combustible fuel. So if you put on a backpack that's going to shoot you into the air while simultaneously combusting a flammable fuel source, that's a little intimidating. It's something you have to take into consideration. You have to have safety measures there, which also adds typically more weight. There are other limitations to jet packs are loud. If you want to strap one on, you probably also want to wear some sort of ear protection

or you're gonna risk damaging your hearing. And you want to keep your distance from other people, not just because your thrusters might be shooting out hot exhaust or winds at high speeds, but also because you wouldn't want to harm anyone with all that noise you're generating. So why haven't we seen more work to make jet packs quieters, safer, and more efficient. Why why are they so far behind

compared to some other technologies. One large part is because there's not really a market for jet packs not a big one anyway, and that means there's very little money to continue the R and D work on a large scale. A lot of the prototypes that have come out have been sort of passion projects by eccentrics who happen to have a lot of money and a desire to have uh an engine strapped to their back that will push them through the air like a maniac. Uh what. I'm

thankful for them, but they are kind of crazy. The other source tends to be things like the Defense Department that might have some money set aside for these sorts of projects, but otherwise you don't really have a market for them. Consumer market for jet packs has only recently become a possible, and even then just for people who are phil they rich not grubby little podcast here like myself, And considering how challenging it must be to keep a jet pack in the air and keep the pilot safe,

it's probably for the best, all right. So let's talk about some of the early attempts to make jet packs leading up to the kinds that are being developed today. So here's another dive into the history of jet packs that actually we're working and we're real windle more of Bell Arrow Systems created the Bell Rocket Belt, which used hydrogen peroxide as rocket fuel, which is useful and that

it's not explosive, so you don't have to worry about that. Uh, And it's safe for a jet pack where to carry around. And it was impressive for its time. It worked, it did not work for very long. The maximum flight time was about twenty one seconds. The belt had three tanks mounted on a fiberglass course, which I'm sure was very slimming.

And they called it a belt instead of a corset, I assume because maybe they thought that otherwise it would be bad pr The left and right tanks had a hydrogen peroxide mix and the center tank contained nitrogen gas. So the nitrogen was used to force the hydrogen peroxide into a catalyst and that would end up creating this chemical mixture of water oxygen and generate a lot of heat. And it was all under a great deal of pressure.

The belt created two hundred eighty pounds of thrust. The first successful untethered test flight of the Bell Rocket Belt was in the nineteen sixties. The flight lasted for fourteen seconds and Harold Graham, the pilot, hit a top speed of six miles per hour, a blistering speed, and traveled

thirty ft. A public demonstration saw him fly for ten seconds, flying over a truck at about fifteen feet and traveling a hundred fifty ft in distance at about ten miles per hour, and more tests revealed that on a typical flight, about ten seconds would be required to make a safe landing. So if you need ten seconds to land and you've got a maximum flight time about twenty one seconds, it really limited how much you could actually do and a go.

So when ten seconds of fuel remained, the pilot's helmet would begin to beep, so it would be an alert saying, hey, you better start your landing procedure now, because in a very short time you will not have that option, and we're coming down whether you're ready or not. One of the test pilots for the Bell Rocket Belt was a guy named Bill Suitor. Suitor would go on to fly the jet pack as a stunt double for Sean Connery

in a little movie called Thunderball. Gordon Yeager was also a stunt pilot of the Belt in some shots, so it wasn't just Bill Suitor. H Then you also have Robert Quarter who also worked on the jet flying belt, which used a w R nineteen fan jet engine from Williams International. That would make this a true jet pack, but they still called it a belt at the time, as opposed to a courset. This was a project funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency, also known as ARPA.

That's the same agency that funded the development of technologies that would later become the underlying tech of the Internet itself. So the reason we have the Internet largely is because of ARPA. They funded a project called Arpanet, which some call the grandfather to the Internet. It's definitely true that the people who worked on Arpanet started to develop the protocols that would end up being the backbone of the Internet itself. Now, this jet flying belt was the product

of John K. Hilbert and Wendell F. Moore. So we're back to talking about more again. Now More had worked on the rocket belt that bell Aero Systems was looking at a few years earlier. Now they were looking at a fan based belt, a fan jet engine belt, so they're moving away from rockets to jet engines um And it definitely looked like a jet pack. It was large and bulky with thrusters that would extend out to the sides.

It kind of looked like oversized shoulders behind the pilot um or a little bit like exhaust pipes that you would see like the exhaust hose that you see out of the back of a of a dryer and a washer dryer, but or you know, just some ducting. That's what kind of what it looked like. Quarter was able to fly to an altitude of about seven meters and he hit top speeds of forty five kilometers an hour.

And the big events here was that it was in fact a jet belt, not a rocket belt, So I was using that real jet engine to generate thrust rather than busting rocket fuel, which meant that you didn't have that super hot exhaust like you did with the rocket belts, and that could make it a little safer to operate, at least in the sense that you're not likely to

set yourself on fire right away. Brad Barker partnered with a guy named Joe Wright and another guy named Larry Stanley to build a new rocket belt, and they based it off of Wendell Moore's design, but this time they were using lighter components and they were using more fuel and in this way, they were able to create a jet belt that would uh actually or a rocket belt I should say, that would actually allow for longer flying

times because it was less weight and more fuel. They even got Bill Suitor to test fly it, so the same guy who test flew the previous rocket belt that William Moore had made. But this story it ends up getting very kind of crazy and tragic. It's one of those stories that when you read it, it seems impossible to believe it first because it's so unusual. So you have Brad Barker and Larry Stanley. They have a disagreement that escalated, and then it escalated to the point of violence.

Brad Barker actually attacked Larry Stanley with a hammer, so Barker was arrested for assault and Stanley in the lawsuit one ownership of the rocket belt, which was called the RB two thousand. So Larry Stanley goes to claim the device from Barker's shop, but he finds that when he gets there, both Brad Barker and the device have gone missing. So Larry Stanley tracks down the other partner, Joe Right, to find out if Joe Wright knows where Brad Barker had gone off to but when he finds Joe right,

Joe Wright is dead. He had been beaten to death. Larry Stanley eventually would find Brad Barker, would take him to court and win a ten million dollar UH reward. I guess or or you know. Barker was fined ten million dollars by the judge and was supposed to be paid to Stanley, but Barker refused to pay Stanley. So Stanley goes finds Barker, grabs him, shoves him in a box, and holds him for eight days until Barker managed to escape. Police would then arrest Larry Stanley on kidnapping charges, and

the RB two thousand never turned up. It was lost. Uh. Who knows where it is? Maybe Brad Barker. Who's to say? That's a pretty crazy story. Now there are other jet packs we can talk about some that that really aren't jet packs, their rocket packs, because jets wouldn't work in the situations that were used in like e v A jet packs. These are rocket packs or rocket belts uh, and they're meant for extra vehicular activities e v A s for space vehicles, so spacewalks is what we're talking

about here. So clearly jets would not work in space. There's no air for you to use to create thrust, so you would need to have rockets instead. There was an early such rocket pack meant for astronauts. It was referred to as the Manned Maneuvering Unit or m m U, developed by NASA in the nineteen eighties, specifically for Space

Shuttle missions UH. It was the descendant of a previous project that the US Air Force had been working on that was known as the Astronaut Maneuvering Unit or a m U. Later on, NASA would develop a smaller system called the Simplified AID for e V A Rescue, which had the acronym SAFER, and that intended use was for emergency rescue of astronauts during spacewalks, rather than as a means of propulsion. In general, the mm us were only

used on three missions. NASA determined that there are alternative means of allowing astronauts to perform spacewalks that are safer and less complicated. Typically tethering the astronauts to the various spacecraft, whether it was the space station or a shuttle or whatever was the preferred method, because operating one of these in space is hard, and it would be very easy to give a command that could make the situation worse

rather than improve it. So despite films like Gravity where you see folks using it all over the place and shooting all over, it's very rare that any one would actually use one of those in the In outer space, they would more likely use robotic arms and tethers to help astronauts get around in spacewalks, and not the actual rocket packs. We got a little bit more to talk about, but before I jump into the final section, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, let's

get back into terrestrial jet jet packs. Since we just talked about the space one. So besides the ones I've already mentioned, there are a few more that I can chat about. There's a group called Jet Machines Extreme. They created a project called the jet Vest and they claimed it was the world's smallest jet turbine flying belt, so it's really more of a jet pack. Their design would allow for flights of up to three or four minutes,

so much longer than those hydrogen peroxide based units. In two thousand twelve, they decided to hold a kickstart a campaign to try and raise thirty dollars to fund the project, but the campaign failed with less than two thousand dollars raised by the end of it, which is that's an ouch where you were twenty eight thousand dollars short of your goal. Uh and I feel you guys, I know

what that feels like. So there are several companies that make jet packs that were based off that old more design from Bell Aeronautics, obviously updated ones that include a company called t AM or TAM, There was another one called Go Fast and one called Thunderbolt Arrow Systems. They all kind of created variations off that same theme. Um Eve's ROSSI that was a person who created one of the winged jet packs, demonstrated his in two thousand six. He leapt out of a hot air balloon went into

a free fall. He then ignited his engines and flew around for more than six minutes before activating his parachute. Uh. He said he didn't have any plans to market that version of the jet pack. He has since done several stunts using this design, including flying alongside other aircraft like a Boeing uh jet. So it's kind of cool. They's been managed to do that also, because his design largely meant that you were already h igniting engines while you were in the air, meant you no longer had to

take off from the ground. And that wing design also means that flying forward he could generate lift. Uh, those wings would help him generate lift unlike just the normal human body, so that also helped him. He meant that he could do crazier maneuvers and not just kind of be in this upright standing position and slowly drift around left or write or forward or backward or up or

down as the case. Maybe. Uh. There's a guy named Frankie Zapata who recently showed off a hoverboard, which obviously isn't quite the same thing as a jet pack, but it is similar to that old flying pie pan design I talked about previously in this episode, only it's way more compact. It looks kind of like a quad copter or drone, and according to Zapata, it can fly autonomously up to ten thousand feet at a top speed of a hundred fifty kilometers perer or ninety three miles pour,

and it can fly for ten minutes. It's powered by kerosene jet fuel, so you know, yikes. It has four fifty horsepower engines in it, and it contains a microcomputer that calculates how much thrust each engine should generate in order to stabilize the platform and allow you to make turns and go in certain directions so that way, it's not entirely up to the pilot's balance. So the previous flying pie pan design meant that you had to shift your weight in order to make the hovercraft essentially go

in whatever direction you wanted. With this high tech version, you have a micro controller in that quad copter design that does it for you. So what it does is it tells each engine how how frequently to turn a propeller essentially or a fan in order to generate the right amount of thrust to keep the platform relatively stable, or to introduce planned instability in order for you to go in a specific direction. It's actually a really clever design, and it's one that is based off of drones and

quad copters. That's how those are able to fly at a level uh out attitude without you constantly having to adjust things on a controller. They'll just kind of most of these level out naturally on their own and by naturally, I mean it's all controlled by a tiny computer that's making very quick decisions as to how much thrust each quad or each copter, each propeller should generate. Um, it's

pretty interesting. Uh. I think we should be glad that this is the case, because otherwise, if you were to over balance, if you're traveling at that speed, the crash would be catastrophic at best, possibly fatal. On Zapata's website, he says the flyboard, which is what he calls it, is not for sale. If it were for sale, it would cost you about two thou dollars. He does offer other products, so it's not like this is the one thing he's ever done. He's created a bunch of water

based hoverboards. I'll talk a little bit more about those in a second, but these are essentially uh jet engines that shoot out water, not air. So you have a tether that goes down into the water, a hose essentially that goes down into a body of water like a lake or river or something like that pulls water up, and then the engines shoot the water out at high velocity, thus creating the thrust you need to altitude. Ramsey is determined to get me into one of these things on

Lake Lanier and have me fly around. And I am, for the record, fully in favor of it. I don't want you to think that I'm saying Ramsey had this idea and I'm terrified of Ramsey. I am terrified of Ramsey, but for totally different reasons. I do want to strap on one of these water jet packs. And um apparently Lake Lanier, which is not too far from Atlanta, has them. So keep an eye out for a potential tech stuff video summer of possibly Jonathan Swan song. We'll see. It

really depends upon a few factors like budget and insurance. Anyway, moving on, there was a company called actually there is a company called Gravity who was founded by Richard Browning, and it broke records in late with a jet engine body suit called, and this is a great name for a flying body suit, the Dadalus. At least it's not the Icarus. If it were the Icarus, I would definitely be raising some eyebrows. But the Dadalists. The record he

set was a speed record. He topped out at fifty one point fifty three kilometers per hour or about thirty two miles per hour. Now, that's slower than a lot of the other devices I've talked about on here. But the specific record he broke was for the fastest speed in a body controlled jet engine power suit, which is such a cool sentence to say that, I'm pretty sure I'm iron Man now. Browning estimates that customizing a suit costs about two fifty thousand dollars, so very similar to

the Zapota flyboard. His suit includes thrusters that are mounted to the arms, meaning you can fly around kind of like Iron Man does when he's in his standing position and he's using his repulsors to sort of hover in place. That's kind of what it looks like when Browning is using his jet suit. There are also thrusters that are on the base of the backpack itself that are providing enough downward thrust to keep you elevated above the ground.

And you can use the thrusters on the arms to sort of guide yourself around and and uh and sort of direct your your motion. Um, but it looks a lot like the pose that Iron Man has when he's hovering in the air. It's kind of cool. And there are videos online so you can look at Richard Browning and the Dadalists jet Engine body suit and see this

in action. He also did a TED talk in seventeen talking about his journey about deciding to build such a thing and what it took to do it and kind of the challenges he had to overcome, as well as footage of him testing the thing. It's pretty cool. There's another company called jet Pack Aviation that has built several jet pack models, including one that an actual civilian got to fly. Someone who wasn't working for jet Pack Aviation

was chosen to be a test pilot for one. Uh it was a YouTuber named Misha Pollock who flew a JB ten jet pack and with no training, he was able to hover around. He was tethered to a safety line, but he was flying actually in an avocado orchard. So lovely. If Jetback Aviation would like a podcaster to do the same sort of thing, I happily volunteer. The JB ten was announced as a consumer product in two sixteen. They said that it would start to be available in uh

the spring or summer of seventeen. And if you have to ask how much it costs, apparently you can't afford it, So I don't know how much it costs, but that means I can't afford it. At CS eighteen, they showed up at the Consumer Electronics Show, so Jetpack Aviation was there and they showed off a prototype of the JB eleven,

the next model in their series. That one is supposed to be able to fly up to altitudes of fifteen thousand feet for up to twelve minutes with a top speed of two hundred miles per hour, which is mind boggling. According to the company, you can manage to find your self as far away as twenty miles from your starting point if you were determined to do so. The weight

limit for those jet packs is two sixty pounds. It is able to fly through courtesy of six turbo jet engines, and the pack can carry of fuel as part of the setup. Uh. Then there's the Martin jet pack that's

marketed as the world's first practical jet pack. It's another ducted fan approach similar to the platform I mentioned earlier, but this one's in backpack form and has a range of thirty kilometers or thirty minutes of flight time, and it runs on gasoline, so the fuel is actually quite easy to get hold of in that case, there's the jet level flyer. This is where we start to move into the water based jet packs. So you could call it a uh jet in the sense that a jet

ski is called a jet. So they're using water or not air. But you put on your bathing suit, you put on your sun screen, you put on your pool shoes. You strap on this backpack with a big old y shaped pipe that's right behind your head and it kind of follows the contours of your shoulders, the ends of the y shape turned down towards your feet, with two nozzles that spray water at an incredible rate, and it looks basically like you've got to fire hoses strapped to

your back, spraying toward the ground. There's a promo video that has a disclaimer that says doc takeoff and landing our high risk maneuvers. Expert training required. So that fills me with confidence. And from their marketing materials they say you don't buy only a jet pack add on kit, you will buy a new way of happiness, which involves being propelled at high speeds above bodies of water. Apparently

there's some really cool stuff about this approach. The water does not have to escape at the same velocity as gas wood in a typical jet pack, because water is a higher density and us can provide more thrust at lower velocities than a gas would, so you're not shooting water out at the same speed that you would have to shoot out air in order to get that amount of thrust. Also, the engine and the fuel system are on a separate floating platform, so the jet pack doesn't

have to take that weight into account. You are tethered both to a floating platform and to the water itself in order to have that constant supply of water, and that offloads some of the actual weight that you would have to carry otherwise for a fully self contained system. On the other hand, this does mean that you are actually tethered to a surface um and it's really a machine on the surface of the water that supplies the

water pressure for your fire hose jet pack. It's not like your fire hose jet pack has a vacuum that's sucking up water. You've actually got that on that mounted platform as well, but you are still tethered down by that water supply hose. And it looks like you could attach the jet pack add on to jet skis if you wanted to and be really super crazy. And there are a lot of different variations of this. I've actually seen them in action in various places that I've gone to.

I've just never been brave enough to strap one on. But as I say, perhaps you will get a chance to see your beloved podcaster Jonathan Strickland in a very not flattering tight wetsuit kind of outfit being tossed around in the air by giant torrents of water. And if you have never wanted to see that, I bet you do now, because I mean, come on laughing at others misfortune, it's it's part of life. Well, that kind of wraps

up this discussion about jet packs. There are other examples I could have talked about, both fictional and real, but these I felt gave a good overview of the technology and what is necessary in order for you to be able to actually have a working jet pack. It also is kind of a wake up call to say, hey, if you want to fly around like Superman, uh, we just don't really have the tech for that unless you're going to put on one of those winged suits um

and and launch from the air already. And even in that case, it requires incredible amounts of skill on athleticism in order to do it properly. And that kind of leads me into that final point about how I don't think jet packs are ever going to be a real consumer technology, largely because they're just so difficult to control and they're so expensive. Those two barriers I think are going to be constant. I don't see them getting any

different anytime in the near future. I don't think we're gonna have a breakthrough in the cost of jet packs. It's going to be a really expensive plaything for a few people who can afford it and are crazy enough to do it. And then on top of that comes the necessity for expertise to be able to operate them safely.

Most of us don't have that. If you want to see what I think a future filled with jet packs would look like, you need to look up the jet packs sketch from that Mitchell and Web look because I'm pretty sure it's incredibly accurate to how a real future filled with jet packs would go, which mostly means people would be turned into projectiles and uncontrollably being hurled into various surfaces and obstacles. And I don't think that's the future we all want, at least not for most of us.

But it is a fascinating thing to think about. It's this enduring idea and enduring enough for people to actually have gone through and made some of the darn things. And to me, that is really impressive. Maybe not practical, but still a really impressive testament to human achievement. And

I think that's worth talking about now. If you guys have any topics you would like me to cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, or maybe there's a guest you would like for me to interview on the show, or a guest host you would like to have here to talk about a specific topic, you should let me know send me a message. The email address for this show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter.

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