Yes. (Sort of.)

It was nice to see an intense interest in jetpack trivia by the comic-relief character, McGee, but the most interesting element of the episode was that it involved a death by jetpack explosion, something that has not happened in the real world in the 8o plus years we’ve been trying to build the dang things. There has been, of course, one actual jetpack-related death — but that was the murder of a fellow involved with a mid-1990s outfit seeking to make a mint doing jetpack demos at major sporting events and mall openings.

While there was a certain amount of banter over the kitschiness of the technology, this was surely the most earnest, unironic treatment of jetpacks ever in a television production. Does this foretell a shift in popular culture’s perception of the greatest invention never realized? Time — and ratings — will tell.

So I recently saw that We Were Promised Jetpacks are coming to the States early next year to headline a tour. To kick off the tour they will be playing in New York City on February 11, which just happens to be my wife’s birthday. Can you say kismet!? Jetpacks, as we all know, work in mysterious ways but I can’t help but think that the stars are starting to align on Operation: OJTS. This morning I emailed the band’s U.S. press contact to see if she will run the idea past WWPJ and I am now standing by for her reply.

In the meantime, let’s all chip in to keep the momentum going, eh? We could help the band out by getting some lyrics together in anticipation of their forthcoming desire to work on the project. Send in a verse or two or even a charming couplet — email me or just post in the comments — and we can combine efforts to get a draft of the song together. Of course we’ll leave it to the band’s discretion to either use what we come up with or to write their own song and, hell, if we end up with two OJTSs, I can think of worse things. (I can actually think of a lot of them but during this season of giving and forgiveness I won’t enumerate them here.)

I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back from We Were Promised Jetpacks. Now, sharpen those pencils and let’s get to paper scratchin’!

Photo courtesy of Someones In The Wolf.

A year ago a 50-year-old Swiss air-devil named Yves Rossy wowed the world by flying his homemade jetpack — really more of a mini jet plane worn on the back, but still — clear across the English Channel. Rossy’s fantastic machine burned four small jet engines to propel the 130-pound carbon wings and the man strapped to them. Pulse-quickening video footage of the flight zapped freely into countless homes and lives. It was the dawn of a beautiful new age of jetpackery.

That was then.

Last week, the day before those of us stateside feasted on birds of an altogether different sort, Rossy attempted an even more ambitious ride: 24 miles in 13 minutes at 140 MPH across the Straight of Gibraltar, from Morocco to southern Spain. But, as Morrissey wisely noted, plans can fall through, and so often they do. And fall Rossy did, halfway through the expected trip, splashing roughly down and then bobbing in the choppy Atlantic. Too much turbulence, wouldn’t you know. Happily, the former military pilot was not hurt. In fact, he appeared to emerge with even his ego unbruised, telling reporters that, “Nothing worthwhile has ever been achieved on the first attempt. One tries and tries again.”

Rossy’s bravery is certainly admirable but he has likely done very little to inspire other would-be James Bonds. There are far easier ways to go for a dip, after all. If any such creatures still exist, chances are they would rather be flying a car these days then a jetpack. At least that’s the impression one gets from this story that ran earlier this week.

If you feel like it is a perennial event that a piece of journalism wonders whatever happened to flying cars, that’s because it is. But this new item has the added benefit of containing new information. Like the fact that there are a dozen — that’s 12! — companies in this country alone developing flying car prototypes and at least one of them plans to swoop to market by the end of 2011. There are, of course, practical questions — will the FAA ever approve the idea, who in the world can afford them when they start at 100 K — but push all of that out of your pretty little heads for just a minute and let’s dream a big dream, shall we?

It’s the winter of 2011. The economy is, miraculously, now humming along and there are even, occasionally, jobs to be had. (I know, but stick with me.) Health care reform has passed and low-income women still have access to legal, financially viable abortions (I said stick with me!). We have won the war in Afghanistan, or, at least, we didn’t lose it entirely. And you are flying your car to work, Minority Report style. On the way home, you slalom the sky tenderly through snowflakes the size of a kitten’s paw. It’s quiet, so quiet, in your bubble-topped wonder-pod that you can almost hear the construction crews on Mars, the jet-fueled jackhammers clanging through space. You glide into your rooftop docking slot and laugh a little about all the rumpus alternate-side parking regulations once caused. If you would like, you can now commence making love to your flawlessly calibrated robot wife right there in the car. The space inside the vehicle might be a tad tight, but robots have special skills.

When is the last time you read a story about space exploration that included any of the following:

*An expert quoted as saying: “We ought to be doing things that are romantic.”

*An excerpt from a folk singer’s song entitled, “A Solar Privateer,” that goes: No cold LOX tanks or reactor banks/ just Mylar by the mile/ No stormy blast to rattle the mast, a/ sober wind and true/ Just haul and tack and ball the jack/ like the waterlubbers do.

*A lede that read: Peter Pan would be so happy.

If you answered never, you’re not alone, so don’t worry. That just means you missed the cover story from last week’s New York Times Science section on sailing in space. (Yes. Sailing. In Space.) It was a story about beauty, romance and the quixotic. It was a story to warm a jetpackist’s perpetually overheated heart.

The very un-NASA-sounding device — called a LightSail — is being pushed by the Planetary Society, in conjunction with Ithaca-based Cosmos Studios, which is run by Carl Sagan’s widow, Ann Druyan. The actual constructing is taking place at Stellar Exploration Inc. in San Luis Obispo, Calif. The project has received considerable funding — enough for a test flight late next year — from a wealthy donor who, so far, would rather remain anonymous.

LightSail-1 will feature super thin (1/5, 000 of an inch thick) and incredibly large (perhaps as long as one mile) Mylar wings in the shape of a giant kite. The wings can absorb cosmic light, which, as the Times notes, “carries not just energy but also momentum.” The vessel would need to piggyback on a larger spacecraft, (the wings stuffed into a box measuring about three quarts, before unfolding to about 340 square feet), in order to reach outer space but would then be set free to roam, gently riding the rippling heavens.

Ready for the catch? (What, you thought there was no catch?) Dr. Louis Friedman, the Director of the Planetary Society, does not foresee a day when the likes of you and me can climb aboard LighSail-1 — or LightSail-2, 3, or 4, for that matter. He told the Times that “the only passengers on an interstellar voyage — even after 200 years of additional technological development — were likely to be robots or perhaps our genomes encoded on a chip, a consequence of the need to keep the craft light, like a giant cosmic kite.”

Okay, if I have to lose my seat on the interstellar delight to genomes encoded on a chip, then that’s a price I am willing to pay for living in that kind of future. Because we may never really have a jetpack but we apparently one day could have computer parts slathered with our biological likeness floating in space. And that’s not nothing.

Hal Graham, the charming original Bell rocketman who in 1961 flew the first free flight of the company’s precursor to a jetpack, the Rocket Belt, died on October 22. To remember and honor Hal, known in the greater rocketing community as “His Eminence,” I am dedicating this space this week to his memory and his incredible life. Below please find the section of my book in which Hal is the star. I didn’t know Hal terribly well but I knew him well enough to be very fond of him and to greatly admire him. I am far from alone.

Harold Graham was an energetic twenty-six-year old with the build of the ice hockey player he was. He’d been hired by Bell a couple of years earlier, taking on the undesirable graveyard shift in the rocket-testing department of the Mercury project. For a year and a half he punched the clock and worked for twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Quickly burned out, he soon resigned and was casting about for something better when the phone rang one day. It was Bell Human Resources—there was a new opening. And it was a day job. “So I went for it,” Graham said in a telephone interview. “Turns out it was a lucky break for me.”

And how. Graham picked up where Moore had left off—with a few minor differences: when the company doctor checked him before his first tethered hangar flight, Graham’s blood pressure spiked at 140. But he soon got over his fears. Thirty-six tests later, the Rocket Belt team was ready to move outside.

On April 20, 1961, a date that for jetpack obsessives carries as much significance as July 20, 1969, does for space nuts, and fifteen days before Alan Shepard first climbed aboard the Mercury, the Bell crew gathered early in the morning on a stretch of turf at the edge of the Niagara Airport. Graham maneuvered into his 140-pound pack. He exhaled deeply, his breath billowing in the cold air. Cars jammed the nearby roadway, drivers straining to catch a glimpse of this comic-book page come to life.

Then Graham was suddenly in the air, toes flexed a foot and a half above the grass, which flattened under the exhaust’s force. The pilot nudged the jetovators. He flew forward. Three, four, maybe five miles per hour. The photographers ambled along in wool suits, clicking madly, keeping pace. In Bell’s film footage, Graham is initially obscured by the clouds of white steam generated by the hydrogen peroxide meeting the low temperature of the air. But as he floated now, the smoke cleared to reveal a determined, if not completely relaxed, pilot kicking gravity’s ass like it had never been kicked before. One hundred and twelve feet later—or eight less than the Wright brothers’ maiden voyage—Harold Graham’s boots reconnected with Earth. There would be many, many drinks that night on Niagara Falls Boulevard.

The team sobered up quickly. Only months remained on the army’s contract, and much work was to be done if Bell hoped to get an extension of two hundred thousand dollars. Which, of course, Wendell Moore badly wanted, if only to have time and resources to improve on the Rocket Belt’s twenty-one-second flight time, a cruel constraint of physics due primarily to the amount of fuel a pilot could comfortably hold on his back. No question, what Moore had come up with was impressive—a man could now come as close as he’d ever been to flying like a bird—but what was the average soldier going to be able to accomplish with a mere twenty-one seconds in the sky?

As it was, the nitrogen tank held two pounds of fuel, whereas forty-seven pounds of hydrogen peroxide was stored in the other compartments. So the Rocket Belt captain was already tinkering with possible alternate fuel sources and thinking about ways to lighten the pack to increase airtime.

Meanwhile, Graham could now launch himself up a thirty-foot hill, leap over a twelve-foot stream, and slalom between ski flags like a cross between Swiss ski legend Silvan Zurbriggen and a Hadada Ibis. He was, in other words, ready for his close-up.

The first public demonstration of the Rocket Belt occurred on June 8, 1961, at Fort Eustis in Virginia. Graham and Bell’s inner circle—Moore, Kreutinger, Ganczak, and Dr. F. Tyler Kelly—traveled down. The army’s point man, a civilian named Robert Graham (no relation to Harold), met the crew and marched them over to a patch of turf that was empty, save for a single parked army truck. Ringing the field were several hundred high-ranking officers and their guests. The plan was for Graham to lift off, elevate above the truck, fly over it, and land. Without breaking anything.

By this point Moore knew he had a reliable machine and a talented pilot. His nerves were not so jittery that a pack of Winstons couldn’t do the trick. He hung back in the crowd and waited for that now familiar shriek.

And then it came—Graham drifted high above the vehicle, the black dot of his helmet providing the point on an inverted exclamation mark of a man. When he floated softly back to Earth, the crowd met him with booming applause. Buck Rogers was finally among them. Graham grinned and threw an unrehearsed salute. “By the time we got back to the hotel,” Bob Roach says, his breath still catching all these years later, “the phone was ringing off the hook,” with calls from local newspapers and the Associated Press.

“Knapsack-Like Jet Enables Man to Fly,” the Hartford Times breathlessly but wrongly asserted. “Flying Belt Rockets into Reality,” exclaimed the Waukegan News-Sun. Many publications pushed the Buck Rogers connection: “Man Flies Like Buck Rogers Now,” “Buck Rogers’ Space Belt Becomes Reality,” and, most poignantly, “Buck Rogers Era Here.” Others turned to more organic analogies. “Old Dream of Flying with Birds Now True,” exclaimed the Philadelphia Bulletin; “Belt on Back Bolts Birdman,” the St. Petersburg Independent alliterated.

Invoking the flight of birds in this way effectively aligned Graham with myths like Icarus and men like da Vinci and Alberto Santos-Dumont. Santos-Dumont was the eccentric, well-tailored Brazilian who, in the early twentieth century, flew lighter-than-air balloons around the Eiffel Tower and was known to park his vessel on the roof of the restaurant at which he was lunching. Once, reminiscing about his childhood, he said, “I would lie in the shade of the verandah and gaze into the fair sky of Brazil. Where the birds fly so high and soar with such ease on their great outstretched wings, where the clouds mount so gaily in the pure light of day, and you have only to raise your eyes to fall in love with space and freedom.”

And just like Alberto Santos-Dumont, Hal Graham was suddenly a celebrity; the Belt, as it was known, was a hit. The Buffalo News arranged a photo shoot, wherein Graham played your average commuting husband, and Carolyn stood in as the doting housewife. The paper shot scenes at the Moores’ place of Graham leaving for work in the morning, kissing his wife good-bye, walking out onto his back porch, and strapping on his jetpack, as if it were tomorrow’s Packard.

Soon, the biggest names in the government were clamoring for a look. At a Pentagon demonstration Graham flew once in the morning and again in the afternoon in front of an estimated six thousand officers and assorted VIPs. For that launch, the young pilot leaped a parked military sedan, traveling about the length of a football field before touching down. The next day’s New York Times carried a report of Graham’s thirty-foot-high launch on its front page. A few months later, Moore and his crew were called to Fort Bragg for their biggest moment yet, a ship-to-shore operation for none other than President Kennedy. In grainy clips of that historic hop, Graham jumps from a small vessel, blitzing low across the water and whitecaps of McKeller’s Lake. And then he’s ashore, a spaceman on the beach, saluting JFK, who returns the gesture. Life magazine captured the exchange from the president’s point of view, the familiar silhouette looking upon American ingenuity at its most creative. The Buffalo Evening News wrote that “Mr. Kennedy was described by an Army Officer sitting near him as ‘wide eyed and open mouthed—just like a kid.’” “My favorite memory has got to be the JFK flight,” Graham told a PBS affiliate years later. “I mean, the president of the United States—where do you go from there?”

One answer: to a demo in Phoenix for then secretary of defense Robert McNamara. Another: nowhere fast—well, at 40 mph, anyway. Although the public and certain corners of the military were understandably smitten with Moore’s invention, there was one serious design flaw yet to be worked out—that frustratingly short twenty-one-second flight time.

Bell had been awarded a contract to demonstrate the concept of its flying machine, but until the company could improve on the Belt’s flight duration, the government wasn’t about to cough up any more dough.

Wendell went back to his Niagara Falls drawing board, his fifteen minutes of fame behind him. Harold Graham went on to careers in teaching, as an accountant, town justice, engineer, computer programmer, and, currently, charter-plane pilot. Now seventy-three years old, he lives with his girlfriend fifty miles west of Knoxville, Tennessee, in a town so small you can mail him a letter without including a street address and he’ll get it.

“The good part is that I did it for the first year and a half we went public—it’s nice being number one,” Graham told me. “If the Wright brothers were the first to fly, who was the fifth to fly?”

Reprinted with the permission of Da Capo Press.

Photo of Hal Graham saluting J.F.K courtesy of Life magazine.

As is often the case with such matters, I was rather late to the Balloon Boy party. It’s not that I am living under an enormous, mossy rock or, worse, without a high-speed Internet connection. I must’ve just been away from my computer for a few hours on October 15 when it all went down. So I didn’t hear about the Balloon Boy until about 4:07 P.M. Eastern Time that day, a good three or four hours after the story broke. That, of course, is a news and gossip lifetime in the age of … well, pick whichever of the countless online harbingers of our speeded-up age you’d like to.

I first heard about the Balloon Boy —naturally named Falcon — when my wife emailed me with the subject: “For your next Faster Times post.” (Sorry to have to get all meta on your virtual arses but there you go.) And my first reaction to her note was: Yes! Perfect! But then two days went by, and then three and even though I was only barely skimming the updates of the story, I’d already grown weary of it by the weekend. And so I thought: No! I will not write about the Balloon Boy!

Yet here I am.

So why am I writing about the Balloon Boy, when I feel perhaps more shruggy about his story than anyone I know? Because it happened up there. In the air. Where jetpacks and other nifty machines want to go. As far as I can tell this story cast such a hold over so many imaginations very much because it happened up there. There is no way to measure this, but I maintain (yes, with my jetpack bias firmly in place) that had this story been about, say, a Train Teen, wherein a family’s homemade steam engine had rushed free of the track with maybe their teenage son aboard, the tale would’ve captivated for a day, two tops.

But no, this all went down up there, in the same spot us Earth-bound mortals gaze when looking for stunning migrating birds, Superman and celestial shakeups. The balloon was mysterious in its retro-future silvery sheen and dangerous in its imminent, leaking collapse and, above all, it was visible to the helpless hordes on the ground. A track-jumping train, by contrast, is much too familiar and, besides, it’s easily corralled.

Maybe this is obvious — of course the Balloon Boy captivated us because it happened up there. As a columnist for the Chicago Tribune put it:

“I don’t know what you were thinking, but if you were a boy once, a certain kind of boy given to books about boys building flying ships at home out of spare parts and egg-beaters and stuff in the garage, a boy who knew the names of all the American astronauts, you could picture yourself in that soaring portabello mushroom.”

And at a time when parents dress like their children and Max and his Wild Things rule the box office, of course we remain deeply curious about events of the air, where many of us would like to linger, leaving Earthly concerns behind. We wish we were kids with nowhere better to be than adrift. That this idea is so obvious only underscores the enduring mystique of the jetpack. For, more than any other machine, it is the jetpack that whispers the loudest promises to take us there.

As I write this I am sitting in Madison Park, between midtown and down, on a glorious fall afternoon in New York City. Looking up, I see through the crooked branches a glittering dome of blue. There is a near-perfect circle of silent sky built inside the tops of the tall buildings cornering the park. It requires serious effort to not stop writing and simply contemplate the impossibly high beauty.

Photo courtesy of the New York Daily News.

A few readers have emailed me recently to ask if I am aware that there is a Scottish indie rock band called We Were Promised Jetpacks. I am, but only a little bit. Some friends were over for dinner last month and one guy had the band on his iPhone so he played them and put the phone in the middle of the table where Lazy Susans once went.

I liked what I heard — reved-up, loudquietloud, springy-guitar  rock that reminded me a little of Icicle Works, who you might remember from this song — so I sought out the band’s music on MySpace.

Then a couple of days ago I had this idea: maybe I can get the band to write a Jetpack Theme Song exclusively for The Faster Times. Ambitious? Yes. Insane? I don’t think so, but let me look into it. As far as I can tell the four Scottsmen have never recorded a song explicitly about jetpacks, per se. But they are obviously fans of the things and understand the mad longing many of us have for what could have been. So … let’s see what we can do, huh? If you are reading this, guys who are in We Were Promised Jetpacks, drop a note in the comments if this sounds like something you might like to pursue.

Meantime, a fun parlor game to play is thinking of your own theme song — what tune would be played if you were a major league baseball player coming up to bat? I have never settled on the perfect song myself but I thought a friend was really on to something a number of years back when he picked “I’m Destructive,” by Dr. Octagon. While this is a good personal theme song, for obvious reasons it’s definitely not right for our jetpack project!

If We Were Promised Jetpacks can’t do the song, maybe I’ll see if that slacker pictured above has the time.

Recently my dad emailed me a link to this marvelous video of a jet-powered merry-go-round. Or, Thundersteed jet ponies, if you will. The ride was created by Brooklyn-based arts combine The Madagascar Institute. Clearly I had little choice but to email a few questions to the man behind the machine, a man who, like Cher, Madonna and Brazilian soccer stars goes by only one name, Hackett. He had a lot to say—and I found all of it interesting, hilarious and inspiring.

TFT: How does your invention work? Could you imagine this technology being adapted to an honest-to-goodness jetpack some day?

HACKETT: The motive power behind the Jet Ponies are pulse jet engines (more specifically: Valveless pulse jet engines, more more specifically: Hiller- Lockwood patent Valveless Pulse Jets). We did not invent them- the concept has been around for maybe a hundred years. They heyday of pulse jets was in the 1940s, when they provided the thrust that threw V1 rockets up from Holland, into gravity’s rainbow, and down onto England. We designed our specific jets from a patent that was filed in 1960s by a Mr. Lockwood. This type of pulse jet is pretty easy to make — as the “valveless” part indicates, there are no valves, in fact no moving parts at all — and is forgiving to the less than surgical tolerances and shaky grasp of precision .
The geometry of the structure causes the shockwave of an initial explosion  (the “BOOM” you can hear right as they start up — the fuel is propane, extra air to enable extra fuel to enable a nice big bang is provided with a leaf blower, and the spark is provided by a neon transformer hooked up to a little generator) go in two directions from the combustion chamber (the wider bit, with the propane line and spark plug going into it). Most of the force rushed around the bend and out the tailpipe as thrust, and the rest take the short route, out the intake. This creates a low pressure system back in the combustion chamber, causing the tail end of the bit that was heading towards the intake to rush back to fill the vacuum, bringing fresh air with it. While all of this is happening propane is still feeding in, so the combustion chamber has fuel, fresh air rushing in, and a hot shockwave rushing in to compress and ignite it all. The ensuing explosion is the “pulse” in “pulse jet”, and these cycles of explosion and recoil happen between 60 and 120 times a second.

Louder than god, glowing white-hot and looking like the trombone of the Apocalypse, pulse jets are also really shitty, inefficient engines. (This should be obvious — energy is energy is energy, and there is no free lunch, and if it makes a lot of noise and puts out a lot of heat that is all energy that is not manifesting as thrust). I have always wanted a jetpack, and one of the reasons I learned to build these things was to further that goal. Each of the Pony jets puts out about 55 pounds of thrust. They are pretty light (remember: no moving parts, barely any parts at all) for jet engines, probably around 30 pounds each. Each jet should be able to lift 25 extra pounds. Account for fuel weight (significant — each jet sucks up something like 4.5 pounds of propane a minute) and each jet can lift 20 pounds of cargo. Subtract further for the weight of the structure that holds it all together and you are looking at a wide, hot, loud pack of 10 jets to get a 150 pound jetpackonaut airborne. So yeah. It is totally doable, and would not be the dumbest thing I have done this year.

What prompted the creating of your jet-powered merry-go round? Tell me about your group and other projects you’ve worked on?

The world needs jet-powered carnival rides. For most people, this need asserts itself as a dull, nagging, ill-defined longing, with one not even sure of exactly what they are missing. We have identified that need, and acted on it. The Madagascar Institute makes machine art (carnival rides, walking machines, things that shoot fire; art that can kill you), but it is a machine art that has a human aspect — like carnival rides, which might look cool and be cleverly engineered but are only really and fully executed when someone rides them. We also do large-scale performative stuff in public places, like a classic movie musical dance number on the steps of the New York Public Library or a naval battle/Busby Berklee routine with paddle boats in Prospect  Park  Lake.

What are the dimensions of the machine and where did you test it before the video was taken? Where is the video shot?

The ride is about 11 feet tall, and the swing arms extend six feet from the center. The supports that hold the ponies swing out as the ride speeds up, making it up to 20 feet or so across. We tested the jet engines in one of the crew’s courtyard the night before installing the ride. The video shows the first time a human has ever ridden on the thing. Hans and the reporter guy are very, very brave. (Or stupid. Whatever). The ride was installed and ran at Gadgetoff, a one-day festival that took place at Snug Harbor, a botanical garden/park/historical center down on Staten Island.

I can’t believe the pilots in the video aren’t wearing helmets! Were you nervous for their safety or for any malfunctions or anything else?

One of our mottoes is “Safety Third.” If the thing failed, it would have failed catastrophically, with the arms shearing off and red-hot jet engines plunging into the crowd (forces would have been directed outward, making my spot at the center the safest place to be. When I say “Safety Third” I mean YOUR safety.)  However, since we are not engineers, we tend to over-engineer the fuck out of everything, so I was pretty confident it was not going to fall apart. If anything, I was more worried about the jets failing and just not running.

Growing up did you ever fantasize about flying a jetpack to work some day? If so, do you still?

Yes and yes, except in my mind riding a jetpack WAS the work, somehow.

Any other similar projects in the works? And what’s next for you?

I do not know of any jet-powered carnival rides that were not built by us, and I feel that if they did exist, I would have heard about it. My hope is that some smartass punk nerd kids somewhere see the video on YouTube and say to themselves “I can do better than that,” and then do.

Next up is adding some improvements to the ride, then running it again on the night of October 17th. Next build is not yet defined — a few things are in the running, like a generator that runs off of gasified coffee grounds, a better walking machine (one with multiple spindly legs that we would mount an opera singer on top of, with skirts to hide the transition, so that it looks like a twelve foot tall, eight legged opera singer, creepily walking around and singing), maybe a hovercraft. If past experience is any guide it will be none of these, but something awesome. If you want, we can let you know.

Yes, please!