Rocket Men

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."

Comments

The 1970's Jet Pack...

[__aaclcg7560]

Whatever happened the jet pack technology that NASA was working on back in the 1970's? Saw it on the "Six Million Dollar Man" TV show.

Gyroscopic stabilizers

[Anonymous Coward]

These people need computer-controlled gyroscopic stabilizers. A fly-by-wire system could dramatically improve the safety of rocketbelts. No doubt that would make them much more popular.

Re:Gyroscopic stabilizers

[jcr]

You can't do it on cheap gyros (read: you're probably spending $5-10k per axis),

Why not? There are gyros that model helicopters use that are cheaper than $100, and an RC chopper is a whole lot twitchier than something with the mass of a human being in it. If your flight only lasts for a couple of minutes, then you hardly need high-precision gyros that won't drift more than a degree per hour.

-jcr

Re:Gyroscopic stabilizers

[e2d2]

This is true, gyros are used to control autonomous vehicles in 3d spaces, specifically using IMUs with multiple gyros on flying vehicles. I'm working on one myself and it's taken years of effort so far, there is a small community of UAV builders that all work to achieve the same goals. So it is possible.

But I wanted to point out that the parent brought up a good point about accuracy. The simple fact is you can't get around the inherent error in such sensors over time. For example, if we have one gyro just measuring one plane and we bank the aircraft into a long slow turn. Any person or device in the aircraft will, in a perfect turn, feel the force of "gravity" coming from directly below, yet the aircraft is most certainly not flying straight. The only way to compensate is to use a filter and combine the IMU sensor data with other types of sensors such as optical, gps, dead reckoning using a compass and a clock, etc. Anything helps to assist, but correction seems to be necessary.

But then you have the added weight of such sensors and the platform weight goes up. You try to compensate this with a larger powerplant and again you get added weight and size. The larger sensors use more power and require larger batteries. It's a balancing act.

The reason we don't see palm sized autonomous vehicles with highly accurate navigation is because of the current size and weight of the sensor packages. That's why new techniques such as using optical flow with a small CCD are so important, for the inherent reduction of weight and power usage.

Duff Man!

[LiquidCoooled]

Theres a guy who flies these jetpacks called the GoFast Rocketman.
hes sponsored by the Go Fast Sports and Beverage Co.

I wonder if he can do the pelvic thrust and Heuuugh?

The link I pointed to contains a movie of him in action (and other stuff).

Sounds like a job for real-time computers

[dpbsmith]

It's understandable that in 1961 the pilot needed to fly the rocket belt with only his own reflexes and semicircular canals to guide him.

But even in the late 1960s my aero-and-astro student colleagues told me that even the Boeing 727 was too unstable to be controlled by a human pilot using reflexes alone: it relied on "yaw dampers," servo mechanisms that amounted to electronic analog computers, to tame the raw behavior of the plane.

The Boeing 777 is a completely "fly-by-wire" design.

It seems to me that it ought to be possible to design microprocessor-controlled rocket belts that would be much easier and safer to fly than those of the 1960s. (Including, of course, electronic active noise cancellation in the helmet to provide at least some reduction of the "deafening noise 3 feet three feet from his ear."

Trying to fly the rocket belts described in the strikes me as rather like trying to fly a full-size, exact model of Langley's Aerodrome. It may be possible--for someone with the reflexes of a Santos-Dumont and the nerves of an Evel Knievel--but it's still just a stunt. The Wright Brothers achievement was ''not'' building an aeroplane that could get off the ground; it was building an aeroplane that they ''and others'' could get (relatively!) ''safely'' off the ground.

Re:Sounds like a job for real-time computers

[jcr]

the next problem is to find a fuel light enough that you can stand up and walk around with more than 20 seconds' worth hanging on your back.

Got it: It's called "gasoline".

How you get a significant amount of its stored energy released in a useful way by a rocket motor is left as an exercise for the reader.

-jcr

On the Fringe

[tb3]

The (strange/interesting/sad) part of this story is how far out the people involved are. I noticed there was no mention, either in the Slate article or the actual convention website, of these guys who claim to have the only functional rocket belt in existence. Then there's Juan Manuel Lozano, the Mexican inventor who claims to developed a break-through method for creating the 90%-pure hydrogen peroxide fuel needed for the rocket belt.

And then there's the whole RB2000 saga, which involved fraud, murder, and the disappearance of the only prototype. The full story can be found on the rocketbelt.nl site. Rocketbelt developers are out there on the edges with the ufologists, perpetual motion researchers, and free energy salesman, with the exception that rocketbelts can actually work!

The Alternative?

[webword]

Very light jets!

2006: The year of the very light jet

Very Light Jet Magazine

The Light Jet Age

OK, so they are a $1-2 million. That's a lot of money. From what I've read, however, these jet packs aren't that cheap either. (They're not mass produced so the price hasn't dropped at all.) If you bought part of a jet as a time share, with say 20-50 other people, the price drops significantly. It is a viable option for some people.