The Case of the Missing Rocket Belt

Anonymous Coward writes "ABC News is running a very interesting article about the story behind those rocket belts you've seen in some movies. Apparently there are only three known to exist but one of them has gone missing leaving a trail of death and intrigue in its wake. From the article: 'One of its developers was found beaten to death in his Houston home, another is a suspect in the killing, and a third faces a possible life sentence for kidnapping the second and holding him hostage for seven days with a hood over his head.'"

Comments

Not commercially viable

[shadowj]

The problem is not that the machines are too expensive to produce; it's that there's no incentive to produce them on any scale. You need a truckload of support hardware, the fuel (hydrogen peroxide) is nasty stuff, and I imagine you'd have government regulators of all flavors descend upon you like flies to shit as soon as you have a working product.

And once you get all of that together... you have a noisy, dangerous, difficult-to-handle flying machine that will carry one very skilled pilot for about 30 seconds.

There may be a market for a few units for sports events, exhibitions, and... oh, wait, we already have that covered, don't we?

Only 3 ? Just Google search Bell jet pack

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to see the Bell ones advertised for $3-5K in back of magazines. Claimed 90 second flights, the sport being called Mountain Jumping.

Thunderball

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of people didn't realize that the opening scene of Thunderball was done without special effects. That real rocket belt was used, just by a trained operator of it.

Thankfully, they didn't use special effects because they would be atrocious. Just take a look at some of the stuff in Moonraker, and that's like 15 or 20 years later.

Re:Now, I am not a rocket scientist but . . .

[shadowj]

It's for real. See this link for some history.

And it really did work in that Bond movie... no special effects there aside from using a trained pilot as a stunt double.

Don't know about the patent, but perhaps it covers some aspect of the newer design rather than the original belt.

Re:Somebody explain this

[Lars T.]

Maybe because he patented it later? How much top-secret stuff do you think is patented anyway? Because patenting something always means putting it on public record. If you look at where the word "patent" comes from, it actually means "open".