The Rocket Man

Augusta Dwyer

In his sleep, Juan Lozano often dreams that he can fly, but unlike most of us, it is a sensation he can compare to a real life experience. “And it is more or less the same,” he says about flying in his homemade rocket belt. “You have no outside reference. It's as if you were flying on your own.”

The words "as if" are key. For what in fact propels Mr. Lozano into the air over the trees and grass of his walled backyard in Cuernavaca, Mexico, is 90 per cent hydrogen peroxide, pressurized by nitrogen and expanded 5000 times as it flows into a small round motor filled with special metallic screens that act as a catalyst. Jets of steam as hot as 1,300 degrees F stream from twin nozzles beside both shoulders as he opens the throttle. The system has enough fuel for 30 seconds of flight. It's enough to allow flight over the awed spectators of a sports stadium or for filming a scene in a James Bond movie – or, as in Mr. Lozano's case, to realize a boyhood ambition.

“As you open the throttle, you feel all that power that is lifting you,” he says. “And you know you are all alone. You don't have wings; you don't have anything. It's exciting, very exciting.”

And if the notion of a balding man of 52 dressed in a space suit flying over his own backyard isn't remarkable enough, the fact that he devised and made the jetpack himself after some 30 years of tinkering ought to be. According to Popular Science magazine, only a handful of people can fly hydrogen peroxide-powered rocket belts, but Lozano is the only one who does so with a belt he has devised and built from scratch. He did so after consulting books from a university library and having seen only one rocket belt in action, when he was seven years old.

That was in 1963, when his mother took him to a space exhibition in Mexico City sponsored by NASA. There he saw an improved version of the original device invented a decade earlier by Wendell Moore at Bell Aerosystems of Buffalo, New York. Backed by a government envisioning exciting new military capabilities, Moore had developed his rockets to the point where they provided little more than 20 seconds of noisy airborne travel.

While it was not enough to send a soldier into battle, “it really impressed me,” says Mr. Lozano. The event might have presaged a career in aviation or mechanical engineering, if not for the fact that he really did not like school. “I skipped school a lot,” he recalls, “and went to work as a helper at a garage where I learned about mechanics, how to weld, paint, work with fiberglass, modify engines for racing. These were the things I wanted to learn and not all the garbage that the teachers wanted me to remember.”

Instead he messed around with motors, immersed himself in his copies of Hot Rod Magazine--with the help of a dictionary--and built a series of go-karts, indulging a youthful passion for speed he has yet to shed.

Lozano was 20, newly married and employed in his father's jewellery-making business when he decided to make a rocket belt, “and from then until now I have never stopped working on hydrogen peroxide projects,” he says. “The problem was I didn't have any money. When I got married, the first priorities were my family, paying the rent, putting food on the table. But with the little money I had left over, I would buy the things I needed for my experiments. That's why it has taken me so many years to do it.”

The machine to distil commercially available 50 per cent hydrogen peroxide to fuel grade took him eight years. The control valve on the belt a year. Then there was the catalyst pack. Experimenting with different metals in the jewellery shop, he eventually came up with fine metal screens of gold, silver, platinum, palladium and rhodium. “That took about two years,” he says.

Lozano went to the library of the local university in Cuernavaca to learn what he needed to know about chemistry and physics. “There I was, studying and studying,” he says, “and then I would check the bibliographies, other books, so that now I have almost all the information there is on hydrogen peroxide. I repeated a lot of the experiments they described and found that some of them were in fact wrong.”

Lozano also spent hours in his workshop. “Many things I found I could do on the first try,” he says. “The caps for the fuel tanks, for example. I had never made one before, but I bought the metal and made one and it turned out fine. The valves as well.” He acknowledges that if maybe he had gone to university and become a professional scientist, he would probably never have gone ahead and actually made the device resulting from his research.

Today, his workshop is a handyman's dream. Dozens of tools hang on every wall. Next to the lathe and stamping press, work tables are littered with parts. He keeps three jetpacks upstairs in his large office, where he explains how he made the stainless steel tanks, the pipes and valves, moving the jet nozzles higher to achieve better stability. One of them, built for his daughter Isabel, the only woman in the world to fly a rocket belt, has a pink carbon fibre frame and straps. Metal rods attached to the frame with its pointy Star Trek-like neckpiece allow the flyer to move forward or backward, to turn over his (or her) axis and to reduce power in order to land. Eric Scott, an American stuntman who has visited him in Mexico, practiced three times a day for three months, Lozano says, to achieve the smooth circling and perfect landing he demonstrates at sports events and in commercials. “It is very, very difficult to fly,” he says.

It is also very dangerous. Last summer, Lozano broke three ribs the first time he flew his belt untethered to a six-meter-tall safety pole. In September, he broke his clavicle, his right hand and four ribs testing the hydrogen peroxide-powered bicycle he'd been working on. “It went badly for me on the bicycle,” he admits, before explaining how it went from zero to 128 kilometers in a single second.

Not surprisingly, Lozano's wife wants him to stop acting as his own crash test dummy. Yet he is far from ready to hang up his Tyvek space suit. Next month he plans to test a rocket-powered motorcycle on a dry lake at Sayula, near Guadalajara “I want to break the world land speed record,” he says, “then use the vehicle in advertisements.”

Then there's the mini-jet he wants to build, and a one-man helicopter he's dubbed The Dragonfly. “I've already designed the motors that go on the rotor tips,” he says. “The rocket gives it power, but what gives it lift is the rotor blade, so you stay up much longer.”

By now, he is able to finance such ventures with sales of his peroxide-distilling machines, some to as far way as Saudi Arabia . His buyers include chemical companies, universities and technical institutes that experiment with peroxide. “With this machine you can also make electronic-grade peroxide,” he says, “that is used in making microchips.”

Lozano also wants to start training pilots to fly in shows at soccer stadiums, recognizing that the crowds may not want to see a man his age do so. That could bring in more money to help him recoup the half a million dollars he calculates he as spent on his projects so far. “What began as a hobby,” he says, “has now become a business.”

Augusta Dwyer, who is originally from Canada, is a freelance journalist living in Mexico City, and a past winner of the Canadian Science Writers Association annual award. A nice album of photographs of Juan Lozano and his jetpack is available at the Popular Science web site.