The future is riddled with obstacles. Just ask Nick Macomber.
After climbing nearly two stories into the air–about 10 to 20 feet–he lost control of the machine and crashed to the ground at an industrial park. He struck hard, landing on his head.
Macomber was not wearing a helmet at the time.
“The guy was bleeding. He had head wounds where he had blood gushing on his face. He was spitting out blood. It looks like he had landed on his knees, and he couldn’t get up,” Alison McCoy, who works near the accident site, told KDVR.
The University of Colorado hospital released Macomber the next day, even though he had a broken jaw and required 27 stitches.
“He should’ve been wearing a helmet, but he’s so good and again this was just a test flight,” Jet Pack International CEO Troy Widgery told KDVR, adding that Macomber had taken more than 400 jetpack flights.
Widgery said the APOLLO jetpack can fly a quarter-mile and rise about 100 feet, remaining airborne for 32 seconds.
That may not sound like much, especially from a machine born of science fiction, but it’s further than the Wright Brothers’ first flight, which lasted 12 seconds and spanned 120 feet.
Progress takes time, and Americans have been interested in the idea of jetpack since at least 1928, when it appeared on the cover of a pulp comic called Amazing Stories, Time reported. That was only 20 years after the Model T was introduced.
From there, the device would appear in everything from the 1965 James Bond flick Thunderball in which Sean Connery escapes a pair of dumbfounded gunmen by riding off into the distance to a 1967 episode of Gilligan’s Island in which the stranded crew finds a military jetpack that they (futilely) hope will help them escape to the mainland.
Much as it may have seemed like fiction to many Americans at the time, a working jetpack was actually created in the late 1950s when Wendell F. Moore of Bell Aerosystems invented the Small Rock Lift Device (SRLD), colloquially dubbed the Rocket Belt, which was designed for soldiers on the battlefield, according to Smithsonian.
Moore patented his flying rocket belt and would “fly” it in tethered tests, but he injured his knee during one of these trials and was forced to pass his passion to one of his engineers, Harold Graham. In April 1961, Graham took the world’s first successful solo flight using a jetpack, according to Engaget.
Eventually, Moore would show his machine off in front of President Kennedy, but the Rocket Belt’s weight remained a limiting factor. Load it up with enough fuel to actually fly anywhere, and it was too heavy to take off. The result was exceedingly short flights that peaked immediately at takeoff.
Still, it was a start.
By 1966, the Rocket Belt could remain aloft for 21.5 seconds and fly for more than 850 feet. That aforementioned scene from Thunderball actually used a real Rocket Belt, flown by Moore’s 19-year-old neighbor.
Over time, many more prototypes would come and go, but years would pass before another would prove as successful (or as functional) as the Rocket Belt. Now, there are several companies that make jetpacks with many different ends.
Jet Pack International, for example, will fly their jetpacks at parties and events (much like the Blue Angels kicking off a football game or an air show). The company also puts on breathtaking displays a la Evel Knievel
In 2008, former TV stuntman Eric Scott flew one of the company’s jetpacks across the 1,053 foot-deep Royal Gorge, just outside Canon City, Colo., The Denver Post reported. The jetpack blasted out hydrogen peroxide that was pressurized at 600 pounds, and Scott flew over the gorge at 75 miles per hour. He was airborne for 21 seconds, traveling 1,500 feet.
Jetpacks may not be a practical mode of transportation, but they’re no longer simply gracing pulp comics.
Even if there have been a few bumps along the road.
