roket belt

The rocket fuel Moore chose was hydrogen peroxide - yep, the same stuff in your bathroom cabinet that can give your hair a bad dye job -- though at a much higher concentration. If this doesn't sound particularly high-tech, well, there were other rocket fuels that could have been used giving Moore three times the power, but they tended to be unstable and dangerous to work with. Given that the intention was to have somebody strap this thing on their back, a less-hazardous fuel seemed prudent.

Not that hydrogen peroxide doesn't have a good kick. When a high concentration of the stuff is passed through a metal catalyst it breaks down into steam and oxygen. The steam takes up a lot more space than the original components of the hydrogen peroxide, so it goes shooting out of the rocket with quite a bit of force.

The backpack was composed of three tanks. The center one was filled with pressurized nitrogen and connected to the outer ones which were filled with the hydrogen peroxide. When the time came to launch the nitrogen flowed out into the outer tanks and pushed the peroxide out two pipes that met in a Y just above the chamber containing the catalyst at the top of the pack. From that chamber the flow, now changed to high pressure steam, was split into two pipes pointed downward with nozzles located just behind the pilot's shoulders. The device was designed to create 280 pounds of thrust which was enough to lift its own weight, plus that of the pilot.

The design of the motor was relatively simple, but building a way to control the belt so it could be flown safely, was more difficult. Moore originally piloted the device himself until an accident during testing broke his kneecap. Eventually an elegant control system was developed that allowed the pack and the nozzles to be swivelled to change the direction of the thrust so the pilot, using a set of hand controls, could manuver the belt up, down, foreward, back and even around in a spinning motion. Later pilots reported that the belt was very easy to control, but that they did need the protection of a thermal suit so that the steam outflow would not burn their legs.

The problem with the rocket belt was range. The rocket engine gave a lot of power, but not for very long. The maximum flight was only 21 seconds. This made for great demonstrations, but was of little practical value. Consequently the Bell rocket belt became mostly a novelty, showing up in places like movies (Thunderball), TV (Lost in Space) and special events ( the opening of the Olympics in 1984). Mainly because of the flight time limitation, the military lost interest in the rocketbelt in the mid-60's, but Moore had another idea. Jet technology had advanced a lot in the past decade. Perhaps it was time to go back and try a jet engine.