The Rocket Belt
EVER SINCE ANTIQUITY HUMANS HAVE DREAMED OF flying with artificial wings. The rocket belt realizes that timeless fantasy with twentieth-century technology. While tales of flight go back at least to the Greek myth of Icarus, the earliest-known imagining of a rocket propulsion unit strapped to a man’s back came in 1928, in a science-fiction short story by Philip Francis Nowlan called “Armageddon 2419 A.D. ,” which appeared in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories . Nowlan’s hero, a World War I ace named Buck Rogers, becomes involved with a radioactive experiment gone awry and awakens five hundred years in the future, when the preferred means of transportation is the rocket belt. The story inspired an avalanche of Buck Rogers sequels in many different media.
The first actual use of a portable rocket took place in Germany in 1933. A brave young man on roller skates ignited a series of solid rockets, which sent him rolling and tumbling along the ground in front of a large, curious audience. Though burned and bruised, he survived his folly only to discover later to his embarrassment that a cameraman had filmed the stunt and shown it as a movie short in theaters throughout the world. Footage of this event can still be found in documentaries about rockets and space flight.
In 1949 Thomas W. Moore, a radar engineer at the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal facility, had an idea for a portable flying belt using rocket propulsion. He discussed his idea with Wernher von Braun, head of the Redstone rocket team, who encouraged him to develop it. The following year Moore submitted a formal proposal and was awarded a $25,000 Army grant for a feasibility study. That study resulted in the “jetvest,” designed to help troops get over rough terrain by running quickly or making jumps of up to twenty feet. Moore’s device worked for only a few seconds—too brief a time to be useful—but it led the Army to pursue other ideas to improve the infantryman’s mobility.
In 1953 Wendell F. Moore (no relation to Thomas), a young engineer assigned to Bell Aerosystems’ X-2 rocketplane project, began making preliminary sketches for a rocket belt at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He refined these concepts after his transfer to Bell’s Niagara Falls, New York, facility and the military started getting interested again. In 1957 the U.S. Army Transportation Research and Development Command defined its requirements for such a device: It would have to provide three hundred pounds of thrust, sufficient to carry a soldier across rugged terrain and gain enough altitude to be useful for surveillance. Moore and his Bell “man-rocket” team had already designed an oddly shaped fifteen-foot-high structure of steel tubing and flexible hose called a nitrogen gas rig, in which they could make tethered flights and investigate the characteristics that a rocket belt would need to fly properly.
After several years of tests and calculations, a prototype was ready. On December 17, 1958, Moore strapped himself into its rubber waist harness, placed its control arms under his armpits, and signaled “thumbs up” to a technician, who released pressurized nitrogen from a large tank. As team members held ropes attached to his body, Moore made the first tethered rocket-belt flight. The scene would be repeated many times over the ensuing months.
On the strength of Moore’s tethered flights, Bell won an Army contract to develop the rocket belt, in August 1960. The contract was a minimum-cost program, so Moore designed the rocket belt with off-the-shelf items, including the standard oxygen breathing bottles used in the X-1 and X-2. The corset to hold the pilot and fuel tanks in flight was fashioned from fiberglass. A series of parachute-quality belts and buckles fitted around the pilot’s waist and shoulders and attached to the fiberglass corset and to a metal frame holding the pressurized fuel tanks.
The fuel used in the rocket belt was 90 percent pure hydrogen peroxide, along with pressurized nitrogen gas to move it through the system. Hydrogen peroxide had been considered a potential propellant since the mid1950s, when a German scientist named Hellmuth Walter found that when highpurity hydrogen peroxide comes into contact with a metal such as copper or silver, an enormous amount of steam is released. Three oxygen bottles were used to contain the fuel: two for the peroxide, located left and right in the rocket-belt frame, and a center bottle containing the pressurized nitrogen.
WHILE TESTING the A-1 prototype rocket belt, Moore suffered the only serious injury in Bell’s rocket-belt program. On his twentieth flight, in 1960, the nylon tether got wrapped around the superheated rocket nozzles, melted, and dropped Moore ten feet to a concrete floor. His kneecap shattered on impact, grounding him from future flights.
Bell began looking for a new test pilot. Twenty-seven-year-old Harold Graham, another Bell rocket engineer, volunteered for the job. In his tethered flights Graham found that he could change direction in pitch and roll by simply shifting his body weight. He controlled yaw with two “jetavators”—small circles of metal on the rocket nozzles controlled by means of a cable system. After thirty-six tethered flights Graham was ready for his first free flight.
On April 20, 1961, a cool morning fifteen days before Alan Shepard’s first Mercury flight, Harold Graham, in front of a group of Army personnel, Bell staff, and reporters, became the first human rocket in history. He activated the thrustcontrol handle with a slight twist of his wrist and sent pressurized hydrogen peroxide into a gas generator. There it made contact with a silver catalyst, creating superheated steam. The steam escaped through two exhaust nozzles, providing thrust for liftoff. Graham, wearing goggles, a crash helmet, and a rubber suit to protect him from the heat, rose off a grassy area near the Bell hangar in a cloud of steam. He reached a height of about eighteen inches. The flight, which carried him 113 feet at a peak speed of 10 mph, lasted only thirteen seconds.
Graham made further demonstrations for many dignitaries, including a 1962 flight in front of President Kennedy at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. By the time he left the rocket-belt program, in 1962, he had made eighty-three untethered flights. Bell had been training two other men, Peter Kedzierski (an aviation mechanic) and Robert F. Courter (a former military pilot), to become the next human missiles. Meanwhile, however, the Army began losing interest in the rocket belt because of its limited flight time: only twenty-one seconds. Although it by now could go from O to 60 mph in two seconds and cover 860 feet, the Army thought its value would be too limited if its flight time could not be extended. In a last-ditch effort to save funding for the program, Bell tried without success to develop a system using peroxide and nitrogen in combination with a high-speed fan to extend the flight time to about sixty seconds. But an open fan was deemed too dangerous if it became loose or dislodged, so the idea was abandoned.
Trying to find a use for its rocket-belt technology, Bell applied the system to various odd configurations, such as a twoman platform, single and two-man pogos, and a rocket chair. Each of these worked well, demonstrating the reliability of hydrogen peroxide propulsion, but the fundamental problem remained: only twenty-one seconds of fuel. Any more than that and the device would be too heavy to take off.
In 1966, with NASA’s Apollo program under way, Bell tried to interest the space agency in its rocket-belt technology. In 1968 it was awarded a $250,000 developmental contract. Since the moon has only one-sixth of the earth’s gravity, the weight restriction would be less severe there, and much longer flights would be possible. Bell proposed a one-man platform that could be used for exploring the lunar surface and a system known as L.E.A.P., or Lunar Escape Astronaut Pogo. The L.E.A.P. idea was meant to provide a backup method of escape for astronauts stranded on the moon, perhaps because of a failure of the lunar module’s ascent engine.
L.E.A.P. was similar to the one-man pogo that Bell had developed earlier, only with bigger fuel tanks. All a stranded astronaut had to do was take out his L.E.A.P. unit (stored in the lunar module), fuel it from the LM’s supply, plan a rendezvous point with the orbiting command module, and fly to safety. Both projects were abandoned. The lunar rover, or moon buggy, replaced the concept of a flying platform as the preferred method of getting around on the moon. L.E.A.P., although a plausible backup, would have added too much weight and cost too much in an already expensive program. Another problem: Bell Aerosystems had designed and built the lunar module’s ascent engine, and pushing too hard for a backup system might have been interpreted as a lack of confidence in its own engine.
IN 1967 THE ADVANCED RESEARCH PROJECTS AGENCY (ARPA), a military research organization, gave Bell thirty million dollars to design a new kind of portable propulsion unit capable of extended flight. This would require a different fuel and engine. The official name for the project was the Individual Mobility System (IMS). The prototype Bell developed was a jet belt, not a rocket belt, and it could stay aloft for up to twenty minutes with a range measured in miles, as opposed to the rocket belt’s 860 feet. It used a Williams Research WR-19 bypass gas-turbine engine about a foot in diameter and two feet long. A pair of translucent fuel tanks held kerosene jet fuel. When fully fueled, the jet belt weighed 170 pounds, at least three times the weight of the rocket belt. Unfortunately the engine was extremely loud, which of course severely limited its usefulness for surveillance. Soon after, federal budget cuts led ARPA to cancel its orders for production of the jet belt. The prototype still exists; it is currently owned by Williams Research of Walled Lake, Michigan.
If Bell had not hired a Hollywood booking agent, the story of belt flying might have ended there. However, back in 1964 Bell had begun placing the rocket belt in movies, television shows, sporting events, and advertisements. It formed the Bell Rocketbelt Flying Team, which consisted of Robert Courter, Gordon Yaeger, Peter Kedzierski, and Bill Suitor. These pilots became stars, stunning crowds all over the world with their spectacular flights. As many as three flights per performance could be scheduled, often with two pilots flying at the same time.
Two of the most important flights were seen by the public in 1965. The first was in the James Bond movie Thunderball , when 007 puts on a rocket belt to escape from pursuing bad guys. The second came in television’s “Lost in Space” science-fiction series. Yaeger and Suitor were flown to a remote site in Death Valley to simulate scenes of a castaway space family on a hostile alien planet exploring their new world. After Thunderball and “Lost in Space,” Bell was deluged with inquiries and at one point had to keep five rocket belts on hand. During these performances the Bell rocket belt maintained a 100 percent safety record, even after 3,000 flights.
Suitor left Bell in 1970, when the rocket-belt program was abandoned, to work for the New York State Power Authority as a turbine operator. Little did he realize that he would soon be flying a rocket belt again. Nelson Tyler, designer of the Tyler Vibrationless Camera Mount, had often seen the Bell rocketbelt team perform at Disneyland. Whenever possible, he asked to have his picture taken alongside the rocket men. Each time he did so, he managed to include an engineering scale somewhere in the photograph. Tyler took these photographs home and began designing his own rocket belt using Bell’s hydrogen peroxide propulsion. Within a few months he had a prototype, but he could not get it to work properly. Upon hearing what Tyler was up to, Suitor got in touch with him and helped refine his version of the belt. Thus was born Tyler’s American Flying Belt Company, in 1970. Since Tyler did not offer his belt for sale, he was not liable for patent infringement.
In a career spanning two decades, Suitor flew for Bell and then Tyler in an impressive list of television series, movies, and commercials, including “Gilligan’s Island,” The Reluctant Astronaut , “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “The Fall Guy,” “Newhart,” and “The A-Team,” along with guest spots on “Entertainment Tonight” and “The Tonight Show.” Suitor made his most spectacular flight at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, where he flew flawlessly in front of a worldwide audience of more than two billion viewers.
More and more work poured into Tyler’s office. As the 1980s wore on, he could have booked the rocket belt every day of the year, but for one problem: Hydrogen peroxide fuel of 90 percent purity, which had been available up to 1984, was no longer being manufactured in the United States. Tyler and his crew had to buy 88 percent grade and put it through a complex distillation process themselves, restricting the fuel supply severely.
Then the program’s first major accident occurred. Peter Kedzierski, flying his first job for Tyler at a sporting event in Australia, had a rough landing on an aircraft cargo lift and fell about twenty feet. Fortunately no spectators were injured, and Kedzierski’s injuries were not life-threatening, but the belt was twisted and damaged. Kedzierski called it quits as a rocket-belt pilot. Suitor told Tyler that he, too, was going to retire. Tyler, not quite finished himself, trained another pilot, a skydiver and hot-air-balloon businessman named Kinnie Gibson. In 1987 Tyler sold his rocket belt to the Tivoli Gardens amusement park in Copenhagen. Gibson now leases the belt from Tivoli. He reportedly earned $1.4 million for forty flights during Michael Jackson’s 1992 concert tour.
THE MOST RECENT ADDITION TO THE ROCKET-BELT family is the RB-2000, built by American Flying Belt, of Houston, Texas (no relation to Tyler’s company). The new belt, which debuted in 1994, was designed by a former Apollo propulsion engineer named Doug Malewicki. The RB-2000 is a copy of the Tyler model with lightweight materials, such as titanium and aluminum, in place of the original stainless steel. When it was time to look for a test pilot, American Flying Belt called none other than Bill Suitor. In January 1995 Suitor made the RB-2000’s first free flight. When asked how he liked it, he replied, “This is the finest version of the rocket belt ever crafted, a real work of art and one pretty bird!”
Just as Tyler did, American Flying Belt is preparing a schedule of individual performances for movies, concerts, and sporting events. When asked why a thirty-five-year-old technology is still in use today, Suitor replied, “Everyone who sees the device in flight can relate to flying free as a bird. That’s what the rocket belt is all about.” He also said that other propulsion systems are being developed that might allow commercial sales of such units. When asked what technology might be used in the new belts, Suitor smiled and said, “When it’s ready, I’ll let you know … after I fly it!”
