Hughes Jet Pack "Pogo Stick" concept

[Triton]

Hughes Jet Pack Pogo Stick concept artwork found on eBay.

[link no longer active]

 

[Orionblamblam]

Re: Hughes Jet Pack Pogo Stick concept artwork

Oh, wow, is THAT a bad idea!

 

[Triton]

Re: Hughes Jet Pack Pogo Stick concept artwork

Oh, wow, is THAT a bad idea!

Makes you wonder why Hughes even bothered to hire an artist for an artist's impression.

 

[Orionblamblam]

Re: Hughes Jet Pack Pogo Stick concept artwork

Makes you wonder why Hughes even bothered to hire an artist for an artist's impression.

I can assure you that a *lot* of really bad ideas get surprisingly far in aerospace, up to and including physical construction and testing. I've seen test rocket motors go *foom* when everyone with any knowledge of the actual motor knew that it would go *foom.*

This particular design is basically a flying Segway... without the active computer controls. A human *could* control it... an acrobat under controlled circumstances, for example. To understand why this is a bad idea, imagine that you built something like this. A pogo stick, let's say. Now, get on it... and balance on it for ten seconds. Good luck with that. Now, do it again while accelerating upwards At 1.5 G's.

 

[Grey Havoc]

It looks like this was primarily intended for combat engineers, sappers and the like, which makes it likely that the primary customer would have been the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

 

[edwest4]

It looks entirely workable. Tethered tests followed by untethered. Had those given bad results then nothing further.

 

[TomcatViP]

200lb of thrust (at the very least) in a tube two inch in diameter and 3 ft length... How long the boost? 20 sec max?
The practical usage of it would be very limited.