Design Fiction: espionage technology and diegetic prototypes

*Real, yet covert, technologies slyly announcing themselves to a general audience through cinema. Sort of. Kind of.

*It’s also great that this BBC webpage, which vaguely resembles news of some kind, is actually a semi-advertisement from an American motion-picture corporation.

http://www.bbc.com/future/sponsored/story/20140108-spy-technologies

“THE JET PACK

“Ever since its appearance in 1965′s Thunderball, the jet pack – used to propel Bond into the air after he kills Jacques Bouvar – became the envy of children everywhere. They would be disappointed to hear that the real-life original had a flying time of only 20 seconds. The Bell Rocket Belt – also known as the simulated Lunar Flying Vehicle (LFV) – was built by Bell Aerospace for NASA and the US Army in the early 1960s. Costing $380,000 (£232,000) each, it used hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which was mixed with nitrogen and ejected as steam and oxygen via two hand-steered propulsion nozzles. However, due to the steam’s superheated temperature of 74°C, all pilots had to wear insulated clothes. Even then the jet pack could climb no higher than around nine metres, and only reach speeds up to 16km/h. Even worse, additional engineering in the 1990s could only improve the flying time to 30 seconds – paltry by the standards of any child….”