Brooklyn Paper: Dec 4, 2008

AIM HIGH!
Author takes flight with jet pack revels.

By Dan Avery

for The Brooklyn Paper

Juan Lozano has a simple dream — to pilot himself through the sky. Littering his rural estate in Mexico is an arsenal of jetpack prototypes and assorted protective gear, as well as the complex machinery the middle-aged jeweler has invented to convert hydrogen peroxide into homemade rocket fuel. Lozano’s obsession has cost him broken bones and more than half-million dollars, but through decades of trial and error, he’s managed to launch 30 feet in the air for a little over 20 seconds.

That — and his rotund figure — has earned him the nickname, “The Rocket-Belt Buddha.” It also earned him a place in Windsor Terrace writer Mac Montandon’s debut book, Jetpack Dreams: One Man’s Up and Down (But Mostly Down) Search for the Greatest Invention That Never Was (Da Capo Press), Montandon’s uniquely pop-cultural take on an engineering obsession.

Other high-flying pioneers profiled in the book include Wendell Moore, the Bell Laboratories scientist who built the first personal propulsion systems back in the 1960s, and Bill Suitor, a pilot who tested rocketpacks for NASA’s Apollo astronauts and jetted into the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

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