Building a jetpack: May 29 - Wendella Moore Memorial Day

Original author: thunderman.net
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“Dad's favorite picture. It depicts a visionary and a dreamer, whom he always was ” - a daughter, Wendell Moore

Wendell Moore became interested in aviation at a young age, after seeing the Stearman training aircraft flying past his parents' house. This simple biplane became the source of his inspiration, and in his 15 years he began to design his own plane on a gasoline engine, which he called "Little Abe."

Wendell wanted to distinguish himself, so he attached a cheap Kodak Brownie camera to pofot his area from the air. His love of creating airplane models eventually inspired Moore to learn how to fly and get a pilot license.

He was educated at Ohio State University, Kent and the Indiana Institute of Technology, at Fort Wayne, where he studied aviation technology and rocket engines. During World War II, he was associated with the Peerless American Corporation in Marion, Indiana. For this company, he developed and created oxygen regulators so that pilots-bomber could breathe at high altitudes during World War II. This engineering experience became a good basis for own inventions.

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Wendell F. Moore liked to wear a dark suit, white starch shirt and bow ties.

Wendell (loved ones simply called Wendy) came to Bell Aircraft (later Bell Aerosystems and finally Bell Aerospace in 1966) in 1945, when the National Aeronautics Advisory Committee (NASA) carried out a new project study.

This new project, designated XS-1, will become a portal for human space flight. The XS-1 was an aircraft designed to collect data on high-speed transitions from subsonic to supersonic speed, and for the first time in the history of the American aerospace plane, he used rocket engines in an aircraft to control speed and orientation. Pretty quickly, Moore and his team set the “experimental R & D” pace for Bell’s X-plane series. They will contribute with their various data and statistics in order to gain fundamental experience on how to make a ship maneuver in the vacuum of outer space outside the earth’s atmosphere.

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Bell X-1A Bell Aircraft, where Moore applied his experience with gases under pressure.

Shortly after Charles “Chuck” Yeager overcame the speed of the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, piloting the Bell XS-1 rocket plane, Moore began to analyze the problems associated with flying at high altitude, namely the lack of control over the aircraft in a rarefied atmosphere.

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Moore (right) and Chuck Yeager's Bell X1-A development team.

However, on December 12, 1953, for Jaeger, the Bell X-1A had a near-fatal flight before Moore had his motion control concept, endorsed by NASA. Yeager tried to break the new height record when his Bell Xl-A entered an uncontrolled rotation of 75,000 feet. At this altitude, Yeager lost control of the aircraft because the X-1A lacked air for aerodynamics.

He went out of control until he reached a height of 25,000 feet, where his excellent flying skills saved him and the plane. After this incident, Moore’s inventions, the rocket control system, were installed in the wings and nasal zones of high-altitude rocket-gliders. These small retro-rockets will have far-reaching consequences for human space flight. Wendell Moore eventually helped develop the jet control system for the North American X-15 spacecraft, as well as the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft for NASA. These small guided missiles are now used on every satellite that has ever rotated around the Earth, the Moon, or other planets.

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Bell Aerospace X-2 Space Plane - a jet control system developed by Moore

Wendell F. Moore did not stop at the jet control system. In 1956, while working on the Bell X-2 rocket project at Edwards Air Force Base in California, he began to paint a picture in the desert sand, standing under the wing of the X-2. One of his colleagues, Jim Powell, who also worked at Bell Aerosystems, looked at this and listened to Moore's concept of what would later become known as the rocket belt. Moore learned that warriors (US Army's Transportation Research Command (TRECOM)) are looking for a way to increase the mobility of infantry. Moore invented a device that could move an infantryman through difficult terrain or be used for reconnaissance from the air.

Returning to Bell Aerosystems with his concept, Moore managed to convince the company's administrators to allow him to create an experimental test setup to prove that the idea would work. Moore developed and built a test rig, which was then used as a training platform for placing and assembling various components to create a portable rocket belt for a controlled human flight.

After several test flights at the gas installation, Moore believed that he could make a rocket belt and did it, but before free flight, he smashed the kneecap under test.

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Wendell initially wanted to be the first pilot to demonstrate the rocket belt in free flight, but with his knee in such a bad shape, he began to look for another test pilot to fly first on this machine. Moore personally coached all his pilots with extreme caution, especially in all matters related to safety.

The rocket belt was “impractical” for military applications due to the limited flight time (only 21 seconds) and extremely loud working noise (131 dB). Nevertheless, the concept of free flight, similar to the flight of a bird, has found its application in the film industry, where the jetpack Bell has contributed to history.

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Shown in more than 13 countries around the world and after many films (James Bond Thunderball) and appearances on television programs (Lost in Space, The Fall Guy, Ark, The A-Team, etc.), pilots of the rocket pack Bell Aerosystems have become celebrities .

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Concepts of the Wendell Moore rocket belt began to include other devices that incorporate this technology, such as single-user flying Pogo and multiplayer rockets, and even interested NASA in its long-distance transport program.

It is rarely mentioned that Wendell Moore also developed and built the world's first astronaut maneuvering device ( Astronaut Maneuvering Unit ) in 1950, a year before the first manned flight of Mercury into space by Alan Shepard. He called it the “Zero Gravity Maneuvering Unit” or “Zero-g Belt”, which would allow the crew of manned spacecraft to have maneuvering tools when they leave their spacecraft for inspection, repair or assembly.

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Moore added pressurized nitrogen as a fuel source that could provide 20 pounds of thrust to his Zero-g belt. Despite the fact that the device has been thoroughly tested on the C-131B aircraft and performed according to its specifications, the time for the Zero-g belt has not yet come. The astronauts of Mercury did not have enough space to bring the device to relatively short flights, and to implement the plans that the United States Air Force was building to launch its own military space program. By the time the NASA Gemini program was launched in 1966, the Zero-g technology was replaced by a much larger maneuvering device in the form of a backpack, which was simply called the LTV Astronaut Maneuvering Unit and was based on the Moore hydrogen peroxide belt.

Among the final achievements of Wendell Moore was the invention of the Bell-Williams Jet Belt. Moore adopted the concept of the rocket belt and applied it to the technology of turbojet engines and developed a much larger version of the personal portable rocket device.

The turbojet belt (Jet Belt) was able to fly together from a pilot for more than 20 minutes at a speed of up to 120 miles per hour, which is a big breakthrough compared to the 21-second flight of the rocket belt and a flight speed of 80 miles per hour. However, after an investment of $ 35 million, the military again abandoned the project after the prototype was completed in 1968. The reason was that the jet belt was too noisy for reconnaissance.

For the invention of the rocket belt, Wendell F. Moore received the Aerospace Pioneer Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1964. In 1965, he was awarded the John Price Weatherill medal from the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Wendell Moore, inventor and engineer, died at the age of 51 on May 29, 1969 and is still one of the unsung heroes of the space age.

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