Where Is My Jetpack? A Bit Of Perspective On Why We're Still On The Ground by Rustin Wright

Way back in ’97 I was the last line of defense for IT problems at a cluster of magazines in McGraw-Hill. Now, the truth was that this cluster was all in the architecture/civil engineering world and not only that, but I wasn’t even on staff. I was a freelancer and, in fact, getting paid through a temp agency.

So this put me in an interesting position. I had flexible hours (sorta) and no career commitment. And, due to a power vacuum, no one boss, as I was shared between magazines and reporting to and paid from the freelancer budget of several independent magazines. But I had an office, a McG-H email and voicemail, could send out packages through the mailroom, and was, de facto and in some ways de jure, the “technology director” of a magazine called Engineering News-Record, which many engineers in other fields had heard of and had vague feelings of respect towards, even if they couldn’t quite remember what field it actually covered.

So, why should you care?

Well, you see, this didn’t come about quite as randomly as I’m making it sound. In fact I had put no small amount of work into creating this situation as it gave me every tech-weenie’s dream. I could call up an astounding range of people and companies, tell them my title (and, of course, since almost nobody worth reaching answers the first call, have them call back and get my voicemail) and tell them that I was curious about a project of theirs and they would tell me all about it. Free samples, documentation, access to engineers, the works.

Even when I would explain that this was just a “personal interest” they wanted badly to believe that nudge-nudge, wink-wink, this was a prelude to a story. Also, being the geek that I am, I wouldn’t *ever* call up the cool people until I had *some* degree of clue, so it all seemed serious because, after all, I wasn’t asking, “what is project foobar?” I was asking “given that I’ve heard that project foobar has problems with loss of blah under conditions of zorch and some work I did a few years ago with blahtoo mostly did that at high temperatures, are you focusing mostly on low intensity applications?” Show me the techie on a wired, underappreciated, and edgy project who doesn’t want to bend a sympathetic and knowledgable ear and I’ll show you a techie who has burnt out.

So … Finally getting to the point, one thing that I looked into was jetpacks. You see, I’d found it odd that, since back in my pre-teen model airplane days (I was an unpowered microplane builder, but I kept my eyes open), people were already building or buying jet engines for their *toys*, the whole predominant story, that jet packs wouldn’t work because jets didn’t function well enough at those sizes, seemed off to me. So I called around. I called around a lot. And I finally reached a guy at JPL who told me an odd tale.

Let me share it with you.

As this guy told it to me, as far back as the forties, aerospace types were curious about the viability of doing jet packs and would have bull sessions about it when the chance came up. Since there wasn't any real military money in it, or commercial for that matter, it all sat on the back burner. But little by little stuff started to come together and, as we have all seen in the famous bit of footage that always turned up on "The Six Million Dollar Man" the military started to get interested too.

So, one guy at a time, a team was assembled at JPL. Basically the word got out around the country that if jetpacks were your bag, you should make your way to Pasadena. And they started to work on the problem in a structured, let’s-get-serious way.

So, what are the specs of a good jetpack?

• It doesn’t need to go fast. By aircraft standards, it will virtually stand still as anything too speedy will tear the human to bits.
• It must run cool. Really cool. Hot engine equals leg kebob. Bad idea.
• It must be quiet. Again, human limitations set the range.
• It must have plenty of range. No point in the thing if it just goes up and back down again. Since it will be moving slower then most prop planes, that’s not too very hard.
• Payload isn’t too bad. You've got a human and his gear. No big bombs or weighty frames to support.

So they picked their slide rules and got to work. But there was just one little thing. A tiny thing. Go back and read that list. Looks a lot like the specs for stealth aircraft, doesn't it?

Allegedly one day a couple of folks from the White House just showed up at the project and said, “as of now you're all reassigned. Your work is all classified; you're now funded.”

“Welcome to the cruise missile program.”

And so the jetpack project morphed into cruise missile engine work and the original project got uncreated. And, predictably, as the years passed, when the none too large community of aerospace engineers would think of doing a jetpack the first thing that they would think of is “didn’t Harry/Phil/Irving go off to JPL to work on that back in 19blah and nothing came of that at all. It must not be viable.”

So here we are, all these years later, and yet we wait. Now I’ve looked around some. I know about the various rocket packs out there (and the novelty act crews making their living with them). I know about the ex-corporate guy and his big muckin’ turbofans. I know about the New Zealand pulse jet crew. I've kept an eye open. But I suspect that there's some very cool stuff coming one of these days and it’ll be a lot less Model-T looking then most people expect.

And when it appears I'm gonna get me one A.S.A.P.

Sweet dreams, dear reader,
Rustin