Popular Science this month profiles Juan Lozano, a retired Mexican engineer who is building his own rocket belt for self-controlled flight. All sorts of interesting factoids in this article. For instance, did you know that there have actually been a dozen people who have taken a ride on a jetpack, from NASA engineers to Kimee Gibson, whose pack closed every show of Michael Jackson’s ‘Dangerous’ tour (and who will let you ride his for $10,000). However, only one other person has built their own pack from scratch, and he had a great deal of specialist help. Juan has only a 24-year old Rastafarian who mixes his rocket fuel. You cannot make this stuff up. The story can sound a bit ridiculous, but after a couple of pages I found his journey incredibly inspiring. Make sure to check out the slideshow images, which are at times even more surreal than the story itself.

[via DefenseTech]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2006 at 8:13 pm and is filed under just plain cool, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.