UP AND AWAY
Jetpack convention (2006)
The home-made rocket strapped to Stuart Ross' back develops around 800hp of thrust. Think Formula One car in rucksack form.
A few tentative squirts lift his feet off the chipboard launch platform in his Sussex back garden. But suddenly the test flight goes wildly out of control. Blasts of superheated steam tear his boots off as the half-inch thick wires tethering him to terra firma tangle around his throat.
The next few seconds are a terrifying blur of twisting cables and flailing limbs. Ross is flung around like a puppet, his helpless body snapping and jerking. Miraculously the hissing bottles on his back empty before he is seriously injured.
"I think we need a new throttle valve, mate..." he deadpans to a dumbstruck assistant between rapid, shallow breaths.
"Complete nightmare. Nearly broke my neck," Stuart says into a microphone as gasps subside and lights go up to shocked applause. His When Jetpacks Go Bad home movie grabs the audience's attention here at the world's first Rocketbelt Convention. But then almost everyone here has designed, built, is building or has actually flown a similar contraption.
An airline captain by profession, Stuart expects to become the first European to make a free, untethered rocketbelt flight by the end of 2006. "They're complicated machines," he says, explaining how a stuck throttle valve caused his near-fatal accident. "That's why there are still only a couple of working belts in the world. Although they look straightforward, there is a lot going on."
And it's going on at 600 degrees centigrade, six inches from his elbows. Stuart began his project four years ago. Now in its third incarnation, it's "99.9 per cent there". He has long since lost track of the time and money his obsession has consumed.
"I know...It's crazy. But something inside me says do it and I do it," he says. "I don't want to sound big-headed but I've landed a 767 on a short runway in a 40 knot crosswind and the adrenalin stays with you for half an hour after. But when you strap a rocketbelt on, the adrenalin starts pumping an hour before and stays with you for the rest of the day. It's truly an amazing machine."
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A few tentative squirts lift his feet off the chipboard launch platform in his Sussex back garden. But suddenly the test flight goes wildly out of control. Blasts of superheated steam tear his boots off as the half-inch thick wires tethering him to terra firma tangle around his throat.
The next few seconds are a terrifying blur of twisting cables and flailing limbs. Ross is flung around like a puppet, his helpless body snapping and jerking. Miraculously the hissing bottles on his back empty before he is seriously injured.
"I think we need a new throttle valve, mate..." he deadpans to a dumbstruck assistant between rapid, shallow breaths.
"Complete nightmare. Nearly broke my neck," Stuart says into a microphone as gasps subside and lights go up to shocked applause. His When Jetpacks Go Bad home movie grabs the audience's attention here at the world's first Rocketbelt Convention. But then almost everyone here has designed, built, is building or has actually flown a similar contraption.
An airline captain by profession, Stuart expects to become the first European to make a free, untethered rocketbelt flight by the end of 2006. "They're complicated machines," he says, explaining how a stuck throttle valve caused his near-fatal accident. "That's why there are still only a couple of working belts in the world. Although they look straightforward, there is a lot going on."
And it's going on at 600 degrees centigrade, six inches from his elbows. Stuart began his project four years ago. Now in its third incarnation, it's "99.9 per cent there". He has long since lost track of the time and money his obsession has consumed.
"I know...It's crazy. But something inside me says do it and I do it," he says. "I don't want to sound big-headed but I've landed a 767 on a short runway in a 40 knot crosswind and the adrenalin stays with you for half an hour after. But when you strap a rocketbelt on, the adrenalin starts pumping an hour before and stays with you for the rest of the day. It's truly an amazing machine."
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SPACE TOURISM
X Prize Cup (2005)
Thanks to the Sixties, a whole generation grew up desperate to become astronauts. At the height of the Apollo era, millions of pyjama-clad, would-be Neil Armstrongs stood in dark gardens around the world, staring at the moon, wondering and dreaming.
Almost forty years later, tired of waiting for NASA to call, a handful of those moonstruck children are building their own spaceships. And they'll take us all along for the ride...for a price.
To date, only 500 people have taken the giant leap out of the earth's atmosphere. But if the claims of the fledging space tourism industry are to be believed, give it a decade and the experience will be yours for the price of a new car.
Space tourism is not new. If you are absurdly wealthy, like Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth and most recently Greg Olsen, US$20 million already buys you a return ticket to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket.
But the new space race is largely a DIY eandeavour, being built independently of government agencies such as NASA by a motley collection of software millionaires, inventors and aggressively adventurous 'entreprenauts'.
For now, at least, it's also suborbital. The winner will be the first to take a paying passenger 100 kilometres or 62 miles above the earth; where the sky turns black and weightlessness begins. And, crucially, bring them home alive.
Simpler and much shorter (under half an hour, typically) than full orbital flights, these commercial suborbital trips could be available within the next two years for $200,000 per person, the price set by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and hastily adopted as the going rate by an industry that had, until then, been thinking more along the lines of $100,000.
Branson entered the race by buying into the technology that enabled Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne to become the first privately-built manned craft to reach space in June last year, winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize in the process.
Rutan's company, Scaled Composites -- which sounds like it should operate from a light industrial unit on the outskirts of Slough but actually occupies a bleeding edge Californian manufacturing facility -- is already busy building a fleet of five SpaceShipTwo passenger ships for Virgin. Construction is still at an early stage. "We are making sure we get the windows in the right places," says Stephen Attenborough, Virgin's 'Vice President of Astronaut Relations' (and, incidentally, grandson of dear old Sir Dickie Attenborough).
So far 40,000 would-be astronauts from 125 countries have registered an interest and dozens have paid deposits. "The first 100 to fly are going to be called the Virgin Galactic Founders and we're pretty much full up on that first 100 now," says Attenborough. "We are hopeful, with the caveat that we are in uncharted territory and there is a lot of work to do, that we will be launching our first commercial flight sometime in 2008, possibly 2009."
Virgin is unquestionably the biggest player and has brought credibility to an industry struggling to be taken seriously. But Branson's is not the only game in town. Not yet, anyway.
"See the spaceships of tomorrow today!" shouts the roadside billboard as we drive across the vast, scrubby emptiness of New Mexico. And funnily enough, that's precisely what we're here to do.
More...
Almost forty years later, tired of waiting for NASA to call, a handful of those moonstruck children are building their own spaceships. And they'll take us all along for the ride...for a price.
To date, only 500 people have taken the giant leap out of the earth's atmosphere. But if the claims of the fledging space tourism industry are to be believed, give it a decade and the experience will be yours for the price of a new car.
Space tourism is not new. If you are absurdly wealthy, like Dennis Tito, Mark Shuttleworth and most recently Greg Olsen, US$20 million already buys you a return ticket to the International Space Station aboard a Russian rocket.
But the new space race is largely a DIY eandeavour, being built independently of government agencies such as NASA by a motley collection of software millionaires, inventors and aggressively adventurous 'entreprenauts'.
For now, at least, it's also suborbital. The winner will be the first to take a paying passenger 100 kilometres or 62 miles above the earth; where the sky turns black and weightlessness begins. And, crucially, bring them home alive.
Simpler and much shorter (under half an hour, typically) than full orbital flights, these commercial suborbital trips could be available within the next two years for $200,000 per person, the price set by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and hastily adopted as the going rate by an industry that had, until then, been thinking more along the lines of $100,000.
Branson entered the race by buying into the technology that enabled Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne to become the first privately-built manned craft to reach space in June last year, winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize in the process.
Rutan's company, Scaled Composites -- which sounds like it should operate from a light industrial unit on the outskirts of Slough but actually occupies a bleeding edge Californian manufacturing facility -- is already busy building a fleet of five SpaceShipTwo passenger ships for Virgin. Construction is still at an early stage. "We are making sure we get the windows in the right places," says Stephen Attenborough, Virgin's 'Vice President of Astronaut Relations' (and, incidentally, grandson of dear old Sir Dickie Attenborough).
So far 40,000 would-be astronauts from 125 countries have registered an interest and dozens have paid deposits. "The first 100 to fly are going to be called the Virgin Galactic Founders and we're pretty much full up on that first 100 now," says Attenborough. "We are hopeful, with the caveat that we are in uncharted territory and there is a lot of work to do, that we will be launching our first commercial flight sometime in 2008, possibly 2009."
Virgin is unquestionably the biggest player and has brought credibility to an industry struggling to be taken seriously. But Branson's is not the only game in town. Not yet, anyway.
"See the spaceships of tomorrow today!" shouts the roadside billboard as we drive across the vast, scrubby emptiness of New Mexico. And funnily enough, that's precisely what we're here to do.
More...