- Brown, Paul.
The Rocketbelt Caper.
Newcastle upon Tyne: Tonto Press, 2007.
ISBN 0-9552183-7-3.
-
Few things are as iconic of the 21st century imagined by
visionaries and science fictioneers of the 20th as the personal
rocketbelt: just strap one on and take to the air, without
complications such as wings, propellers, pilots, fuselage, or landing
gear. Flying belts were a fixture of Buck Rogers comic strips and
movie serials, and in 1965 Isaac Asimov predicted that by 1990 office
workers would beat the traffic by commuting to work in their personal
rocketbelts.
The possibilities of a personal flying machine did not
escape the military, which imagined infantry soaring above
the battlefield and outflanking antiquated tanks and
troops on the ground. In the 1950s, engineers at the
Bell Aircraft Corporation, builders of the X-1, the first
plane to break the sound barrier, built prototypes of
rocketbelts powered by monopropellant hydrogen peroxide,
and eventually won a U.S. Army contract to demonstrate
such a device. On April 20th, 1961, the first free flight
occurred, and a public demonstration was performed the
following June 8th. The rocketbelt was an immediate sensation.
The Bell rocketbelt appeared in the James Bond film
Thunderball,
was showcased at the 1964 World's
Fair in New York, at Disneyland, and at the first Super Bowl of
American football in 1967. Although able to fly only twenty-odd
seconds and reach an altitude of about 20 metres, here was Buck Rogers
made real—certainly before long engineers would work out the
remaining wrinkles and everybody would be taking to the skies.
And then a funny thing happened—nothing. Wendell
Moore, creator of the rocketbelt at Bell, died in 1969
at age 51, and with no follow-up interest from the
U.S. Army, the project was cancelled and the Bell rocketbelt
never flew again. Enter Nelson Tyler, engineer and aerial
photographer, who on his own initiative built a copy
of the Bell rocketbelt which, under his ownership and
subsequent proprietors made numerous promotional appearances
around the world, including the opening ceremony of the
1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, before a television
audience estimated in excess of two billion.
All of this is prologue to the utterly bizarre story
of the RB-2000 rocketbelt, launched by three partners
in 1992, motivated both by their individual obsession
with flying a rocketbelt and dreams of the fortune they'd
make from public appearances: the owners of the
Tyler rocketbelt were getting US$25,000 per flight at
the time. Obsession is not a good thing to bring to a
business venture, and things rapidly went from bad
to worse to truly horrid. Even before the RB-2000's first
and last public flight in June 1995 (which was a
complete success), one of the partners had held a gun
to another's head who, in return, assaulted the first
with a hammer, inflicting serious wounds.
In July of 1998, the third partner was brutally
murdered in his home, and to this day no charges have been
made in the case. Not long thereafter one of the two
surviving partners sued the other and won a judgement
in excess of US$10 million and custody of the RB-2000,
which had disappeared immediately after its sole public
flight. When no rocketbelt or money was forthcoming,
the plaintiff kidnapped the defendant and imprisoned
him in a wooden box for eight days, when fortuitous
circumstances permitted the victim to escape. The kidnapper
was quickly apprehended and subsequently sentenced to
life plus ten years for the crime (the sentence was
later reduced to eight years). The kidnappee
later spent more than five months in jail for contempt of
court for failing to produce the RB-2000 in a civil suit.
To this day, the whereabouts of the RB-2000, if it still
exists, are unknown.
Now, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that
flitting through the sky with a contraption powered by highly volatile
and corrosive propellant, with total flight time of 21 seconds, and no
backup systems of any kind is a perilous undertaking. But who would
have guessed that trying to do so would entail the kinds of
consequences the RB-2000 venture inflicted upon its principals?
A final chapter covers recent events in rocketbelt land,
including the first International Rocketbelt Convention
in 2006. The reader is directed to Peter Gijsberts'
www.rocketbelt.nl site
for news and additional information on present-day rocketbelt
projects, including commercial ventures attempting to bring
rocketbelts to market. One of the most remarkable things about
the curious history of rocketbelts is that, despite occasional claims
and ambitious plans, in the more than 45
years which have elapsed since the first flight of the
Bell rocketbelt, nobody has substantially improved upon
its performance.
A U.S. Edition was published in
2005, but is now out of print.
December 2007 