Bell Rocket Belt at Sydney, Australia 1964-04-20 Universal Newsreel V37, I32 (Patreon)

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Bell Aerosystems Corporation, Bell Aerospace rocket belt demonstration. 

Originally a public domain film, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.

The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Rocket_Belt

Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The Bell Rocket Belt is a low-power rocket propulsion device that allows an individual to safely travel or leap over small distances. It is a type of rocket pack...

Overview

Bell Aerosystems began development of a rocket pack which it called the "Bell Rocket Belt" or "man-rocket" for the US Army in the mid 1950s. It was demonstrated in 1961 but 5 gallons of hydrogen peroxide as fuel for 21 seconds of flight time did not impress the army and development was cancelled. This concept was revived in the 1990s and today these packs can provide powerful, manageable thrust. This rocket belt's propulsion works with superheated water vapour. A gas cylinder contains nitrogen gas, and two cylinders containing highly concentrated hydrogen peroxide. The nitrogen presses the hydrogen peroxide onto a catalyst, which decomposes the hydrogen peroxide into a mixture of superheated steam and oxygen with a temperature of about 740 °C. This was led by two insulated curved tubes to two nozzles where it blasted out, supplying the propulsion. The pilot can vector the thrust by altering the direction of the nozzles through hand-operated controls. To protect from resulting burns the pilot had to wear insulating clothes.

The Bell Rocket Belt was successful and popular but was limited in its potential uses to the Army due to limited fuel storage. As a result, the Army turned its attention to missile development, and the Rocket Belt project was discontinued.

One Bell Rocket Belt is on display at the Smithsonian Institution's, National Air and Space Museum annex, the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, located near Dulles Airport. Another resides at the State University of New York at Buffalo's Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. It has been used in presentations at Disneyland and at the 1984 Summer Olympics and 1996 Summer Olympics opening ceremonies. It has also been seen in movies and on television. This type of rocket belt was used in the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball. It also made an appearance in the Lost in Space television series as well as the 1976 CBS Saturday morning children's live action TV show "Ark II"...

History

Wendell F. Moore began working on a rocket pack as early as 1953 (possibly, after learning about Thomas Moore's work) while working as an engineer at Bell Aerosystems. Experiments began in the mid-1950s. Developing the engine did not present difficulties — the application of hydrogen peroxide was well developed by missilemen. The main problem was achieving stable and steady flight; for this, a reliable and convenient control system had to be developed.

In 1959 the U.S. Army contracted Aerojet General to conduct feasibility studies on a Rocket Belt and contracted Bell Aerosystems to develop a Small Rocket Lift Device (SRLD). The experimental rig, which worked on compressed nitrogen, was prepared. Its steel tubing frame allowed a tester to be attached to the rig...

A rocket motor with a thrust of 280 pounds-force (1.25 kN or 127 kgf) was chosen. The pack with its fuel weighed 125 lb (57 kg). The pack had a fiberglass frame contoured to fit the operator's body, secured with straps, and cylinders of fuel and nitrogen were attached to the frame...

On 8 June 1962, the pack was publicly demonstrated for the first time before several hundred officers at the Fort Eustis military base. Other public demonstrations then followed, including the famous flight in the Pentagon courtyard. On that day Harold Graham flew before 3000 members of the military department...

...the army was disappointed. The maximum duration of flight of the rocket pack was 21 seconds, with a range of only 120 m...