65 Years Later, We’re Still Trying To Make The Star Wars Jetpack A Reality

Big development, everyone: “The prospect of more rocket-belts and more trained operators is already beyond the planning stage.” That exciting announcement comes from Robert D. Roach, Jr., who adds that “some see [rocket-belts] as the answer for the traffic-jammed commuter,” while “others see humane rescues from points of difficult access.” Even more remarkably, a modified rocket-belt “may well become man’s preferred choice … after landing on the surface of the moon.”

Roach’s optimistic report can be found in Technology and Culture; specifically, the Fall 1963 edition. He’s writing about the making of the Bell Rocket Belt, which, on April 20, 1961, fulfilled what Roach called “one of man’s ageless dreams—unencumbered free-flight utilizing an integrated propulsion system.” It’s not quite "slipped the surly bonds of Earth,” but the enthusiasm is certainly there.

Sixty-five years later, as the Mandalorian zooms across movie screens, one of Din Djarin’s most recognizable accessories will be his sleek jetpack. And as audiences leave theaters, some people will be asking a long-standing question. Why don’t they have one of those?

Moving Like Mando

Mando follows a long lineage of pulp sci-fi heroes whose preferred mode of transportation utilizes an integrated propulsion system: Iron Man, the Rocketeer, Flash Gordon, and many, many more. And for as long as our favorite characters have been flying, we’ve been wanting to imitate them. In reporting on the Bell Rocket Belt in 1961, Life even noted that “The Army, which financed it, hopes it will someday make foot soldiers all look like Buck Rogers.” The belt only had 30 seconds of fuel and allowed engineer Harold Graham to fly “gently above a truck.”

We’re still not going vertical to defeat traffic jams, and optimism about a jetpack-enabled future has given way to irritation that modern technology has instead built new ways to be scammed and spammed. Where's My Jetpack? asks Daniel H. Wilson’s 2007 book. “One of the most common complaints against science is that we don’t have jetpacks yet, as was ‘promised,’” The Guardian reported in 2014. There’s literally a band called We Were Promised Jetpacks, and they’ve been around since 2003.

Technically, we do have jetpacks. Gravity Industries’ jet suit, for example, has been used in a race, and tested for search-and-rescue, military, and police operations. The issue is that it costs $440,000. We weren’t promised jetpacks, only the general existence of jetpacks, and in that sense, science has delivered. There’s not much stopping us from building Mando’s jetpack, but very few of us have the needs of an interstellar bounty hunter.

“The Mandalorian pack is on the upper end of plausible, depending on how long you need to fly,” says YouTuber, Wired blogger, and Southeastern Louisiana University Associate Professor of Physics Rhett Allain. “You could probably make it work, [but] it just wouldn’t be practically worth it. The short flight time and the danger involved make it’s not trivial.”

Just what’s going on under the hood to make it so finicky?

Jet Packs and Rocketeers

While jetpack has become a universal term, Allain explains to Inverse that we’re really talking about two different kinds of machines: jetpacks and rocket packs. A rocket like Mando’s requires fuel — say, a mixture of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen — that you shoot out behind you.

"The problem with those is that you can't decrease the thrust,” Allain says. “You can turn them off, but you can't restart them. And you see how long it takes to fuel up a rocket and check it for leaks. It’s a lot more difficult to manage.”

A jet, however, sucks in air and blasts it out behind you.

“It's all a matter of how much fuel you can carry and how much thrust you can get,” Allain says. “With a rocket, you have to carry all the mass that you're going to use. You can't have tons of fuel without getting too big. Whereas a jet, you just use fuel to give air energy. You don't have to carry that air with you. But you're not going to have a jet in space, because there's no air in space.”

With these basics in mind, some pop culture icons look more practical than others.

“The Vulture in Spider-Man, he has basically a quadcopter drone and wings, I think that's fine,” Allain says. “Then you have Iron Man, there's no way that works. There's no fuel. It's not a jet, so it's not taking in air. It just comes out of his feet, but he doesn't carry fuel with him. It's cool, but the physics of it really don’t hold up.”

But how useful is any of this in reality? Gravity Industries, to Allain’s eye, seems to be managing the thrust question okay, leaving fuel as the company’s biggest challenge. Gravity and a rival company, JetPack Aviation, are both limited to 10 minutes of flying, tops. That’s an improvement over the five-minute cutoff of a few years ago, but it doesn’t bring to mind a lengthy search operation or a Jetsons-style commute across town, either.

While the Bell Rocket Belt was a hit in public, it was mothballed because it was never practical enough to justify the cost. Modern engineers have certainly improved on Bell’s 30-second flight time, but concerns about fuel may persist into the foreseeable future. And if that’s the case, practical uses may be nonexistent, no matter how often exciting headlines splash across our feeds.

Companies once called groundbreaking, like Maverick Aviation was in 2022 for an “auto-stabilised flight control system” that made its jetpack “virtually effortless to fly,” are now defunct. Maverick’s promised applications in first response, defense and security, remote maintenance work, and entertainment never found a viable market, and while Gravity has been getting breathless media coverage for nearly a decade, it has few customers to actually show for it.

“I don't think I would commute with a jetpack,” Allain says. “I’m going to stick to my bike. The question of fuel is always going to be there.”

The Future of Flying

Despite Allain’s plans to stay grounded, he’s optimistic about the future of jetpack tech.

“If you could come up with an advanced battery, you could make an electric jetpack with turbofans,” Allain says. “Those hoverboards you can fly on, it's basically the same kind of motor that you'd put on a quadcopter drone, but on a base so you can fly around like Green Goblin. I assume those would have a better battery life, because you can make a very large drone that can fly very far. That seems like it could be more feasible. You could recharge with solar panels, it's more independent.”

Gravity actually has a battery-powered prototype, although it can only fly for 15 seconds. Current batteries just aren’t powerful enough to do better. Still, we’re almost certainly going to keep trying. We may not want to commute via jetpack — just imagine the noise pollution and fuel costs, let alone the consequences of an accident — but pretty much everyone would love to try one for a few minutes.

"We always want to think about expanding into new worlds,” Allain says. “Why is SCUBA diving so cool? Because you can go somewhere you couldn't normally go. I think the same thing is true of our obsession with flying. We dream of being like something that we're not. Rockets give us that extra dimension of mobility. We just think it's cool.”

When Allain says “always,” he’s not kidding. Roach, in 1963, wrote, “The desire to fly has appealed to man since he first noticed the birds and the flight of objects thrown through the air, and harbored the thought of reaching the heavenly bodies,” quite possibly while he was fantasizing about zooming through the air himself. But he also warned, “Only time will tell the extent of the role to be played by this man-machine mode of flying in the future of man’s transportation.”

For now, that role is as a pop culture totem, a reminder of a tantalizing future that wasn’t meant to be. Bell never found a practical use for its Rocket Belt, but the device, while technically a failure, remains famous for its role in Thunderball. It was everywhere for a while, appearing in Super Bowl 1’s half-time show, at Disneyland, on episodes of Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island, and even in a PBR commercial (don’t drink and jet).

We couldn’t find a practical purpose for the jetpack then, and the jetpack-powered rescue operations we’ve been speculating about for decades now have yet to happen. But the technology is still fun. And so, while we’ve hopefully taught you a little bit about physics, don’t sweat the scientific details when you watch Mando blast across the big screen. “Remember how bad it got when they tried to explain the Force,” Allain says. “Leave it a mystery, that's what makes it great.”

The Mandalorian and Grogu is playing in theaters.