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Rocket Men

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the excellent-reason-to-go-into-traction dept.

theodp writes "Slate reports on the guys who really, really want to fly, who got together the other week at the Niagara Aerospace Museum for the First International Rocketbelt Convention. To date, only 11 men in history have free-flown a rocketbelt (aka JetPack). More men have walked on the moon. Why? 'It's not a matter of if you get hurt, it's when,' says Eric Scott, an ex-stuntman who's in the exclusive club."

3 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Re:And this is different from by Itninja · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I guess the big difference is that if you bite it boarding, you might get seriously hurt. With an outside chance of death. Whereas, if your 150ft in the air, travelling at 25mph, and your jetpack decides to crap out.... there would only be an outside chance of NOT becoming a mangled corpse.

    --
    I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
  2. Re:rocket "belt" by Hangin10 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This part of it I don't understand. I can understand being strapped to it, but why should the human have to support it? Why not have "_|"-shaped (excuse the ASCII-art excursion) bars under the arms and up over the chest/shoulder area with the human ON the device (like a flying Segway, just not quite so white and nerdy). This probably changes the whole concept, but I'd rather get into what I described rather than strap a rocket to my back. Strapping a rocket to one's back seems rather ill-advised in a rather distinctly "Acme" fashion...

  3. Re:Gyroscopic stabilizers by evanbd · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Hmm. I don't know how good those gyros are; I was of the impression that there wasn't really a whole lot between the cheap sensor grade stuff and the good navigation grade fiber optic ones. Also, AIUI the differences aren't just in drift rate, but also in things like vibration sensitivity and cross-axis coupling.

    I suppose you could use the inexpensive ones, as long as your goal was to change the pilot requirement from "top of the line test pilot" to "very good helicopter pilot," and not an attempt to make it flyable by anyone with a bit of simulator practice.

    You might do an ok job if the gyros just tried to hold the spin *rate* to zero, and let the pilot handle leveling the vehicle; one fewer integral makes for much slower error growth.