Taking a Jet Pack Flight | Explorer

Can we get out in the field and see it in action? Yep, you bet. Beautiful scene! It's a good day for a flight. Best of luck, buddy!

[Music]
[Applause]
[Music]
[Music]

This mag can fly. Seeing a man soar in the air is nothing short of majestic, even more so as it means my jetpack dreams are alive and well. But if the most advanced jetpack in the most technologically advanced age of the world has ever known still only gets us 33 seconds of flight time, well, I guess we're not quite ready to go full Rocketeer just yet.

That turns out, even though Troy and his team have improved upon Bell's model, fuel capacity seems to forever be the jetpack's biggest hang-up. Because a tank can only hold what a pilot can carry. At the present time, nobody has solved their problem. You have to have large canisters of fuel, and that's why rockets are so big. Rockets are so big precisely because you need large amounts of fuel to boost an object into the air for more than a few seconds.

The hope is that one day we'll have a nano battery—a power supply that is at the molecular atomic level—that is small enough to put on your back or in a ray gun or inside the engine of a flying car. That's the problem that we physicists face: miniaturization of energy. So while Troy and his team might have only given us 12 more seconds of a head time in the realms of futuristic dreams, maybe practicality isn't everything.

The fact is this jetpack technology isn't really ready for primetime, but we're working on it. And when you look ahead at what the next great technological breakthroughs will be, maybe as so often, it's science fiction that leads the way. What is the rocket fuel that energizes science? That is curiosity.

I'm a physicist; we never give up on anything. And until we can solve the problem of energy—concentrated energy on a small scale—then it's still just a dream. But I say dream on!

[Music]
Oh!