Bell Rocket Belt

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.

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".

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