Submission + - Practical Jetpack Aviable "soon" (nytimes.com)
Ifandbut writes: ""There is nothing that even comes close to the dream that the jetpack allows you to achieve," said Robert J. Thompson, the director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. He called it "about the coolest desire left to mankind."
For Mr. Martin, the jetpack is the culmination of a dream that began as a 5-year-old in Dunedin, New Zealand. For those who still remember childhood dreams of flying and comic-book visions of the 21st century, the jetpack suggests the possible fulfillment of the yearning for those long-promised gifts of technology.
It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. "If you're very pedantic," Mr. Martin acknowledged, a gasoline-powered piston engine runs the large rotors. Jet Skis, he pointed out, are not jets, and the atmospheric jet stream is not created by engines. "This thing flies on a jet of air," he said. Or, more simply, it flies.""
For Mr. Martin, the jetpack is the culmination of a dream that began as a 5-year-old in Dunedin, New Zealand. For those who still remember childhood dreams of flying and comic-book visions of the 21st century, the jetpack suggests the possible fulfillment of the yearning for those long-promised gifts of technology.
It is also not, to put it bluntly, a jet. "If you're very pedantic," Mr. Martin acknowledged, a gasoline-powered piston engine runs the large rotors. Jet Skis, he pointed out, are not jets, and the atmospheric jet stream is not created by engines. "This thing flies on a jet of air," he said. Or, more simply, it flies.""
