If you asked anyone in the 1970s what the future would be like, chances are they would agree on one thing: we’ll all have jet packs.

In late 1977, this dream seemed tantalizingly close to reality. Popular Mechanics was running an ad for the ‘Space Ranger’, which was not exactly a jet pack, but it was a personal rocket powered flying platform. Why split hairs?

The Space Ranger was touted as ‘the amazing sport vehicle’, ‘safe and easy to fly’. Steering was simple: simply lean in the direction you wanted to go. It would take off vertically and fly forwards, backwards and sideways, to a claimed height of 5,000 ft. It ran on ordinary bottles of liquid propane. Here’s the clincher: it could easily be assembled in your workshop or at a local welding shop ‘in a matter of days’.

The whole shebang could be yours for just $5,795 (the price of a Ford Falcon at the time) and would be sent to you in kit form. If you were low on funds, $97.50 would get you the blueprints and construction plans but you would have to source the components yourself.

What really sold the whole thing was photo of the Space Ranger in action. (Although the eagle-eyed might notice that this was, in fact, a photomontage.)

This ad caught the attention of the media, especially the United Press, who sent a reporter along to see what this was all about. Richard Timewell, the man behind the Space Ranger, was happy to promote his invention. This resulted in an extended interview, which then ran in adapted forms in various syndicated newspapers.

I have tried to piece together the full story by trawling through newspaper archives. The United Press interview seems to be the only direct reporting on Timewell’s efforts; all other newspaper articles cite it as their sole source (with one possible exception). These newspaper articles were in turn the basis for all the information available online about the Space Ranger.

So this is Richard Timewell’s story, as told to the press.

Richard Timewell, 32 years old at the time of the 1977 interview, was a Canadian former sheet metal worker and real estate agent. He had gotten the idea for a personal jetpack after seeing one in a James Bond movie, namely 1965’s Thunderball, where Sean Connery uses one to escape from Blofeld’s goons.

The Bell-Textron rocket belt used in Thunderball had a flight time of about 20 seconds, after which it would drop like a stone. Clearly a different approach would be needed for sustained personal flight. However, strapping a jet engine and fuel tank to your back was cumbersome, not to mention extremely unsafe..` Looking for an alternative, Timewell got into contact with Eugene Gluhareff, who was selling his G-8 series of rocket engines at the time.

Eugene Gluhareff was certainly a kindred spirit. He was born in 1916 in what was then Petrograd in Imperial Russia, and his family came to the United States in the wake of the Russian Revolution. Gluhareff went on to work for the Sikorsky company and in the 1950s became one of the pioneers of the microhelicopter, a concept which attracted a lot of attention at the time, notably from the armed forces. He built several models, including the RH-1 Pinwheel strap on helicopter pack for the US Navy. His designs were typically powered by tipjets on each rotor blade. However, none of his projects ever made it past the prototype stage.

This work on microhelicopters did lead Gluhareff to develop the G-8, a range of small rocket engines than ran on liquid propane. One of the advantages of using liquid propane was that, since the fuel was already pressurised, there was no need for a compressor. The engine could therefore be kept very light and simple. All you needed to do was to open the expansion valve and start the ignition. They were also fully throttleable, an important feature for Timewell as the height control of his flying platform would be done by varying the thrust of the engines.Timewell persuaded Gluhareff to produce a 130 lbs thrust version of his engine, and designed a flying platform powered by four engines mounted at the corners. Gluhareff must have been impressed with Timewell, as he used a photo of the flying platform to advertise his rocket engines. Timewell dubbed his creation the ‘Space Ranger’ and sunk all his savings into the project, some $70,000 in 1977 money (equivalent to well over $370,000 today).

One problem he immediately ran into was that in Canada individuals were forbidden to build jet engines or sell experimental aircraft through the mail. The United States had more relaxed regulations; as long as the craft was clearly marked as ‘experimental’ and it was built and paid for more than 50% by the purchaser, there was no problem. The US Government wasn’t going to stand in the way of citizens wishing to build their own flying platforms.

So Timewell moved from Vancouver to Seattle and started working on his platform, making the occasional clandestine test flight. It took him three years to get the point where he felt confident to present his work to the public. There is one photo where he and his wife are assembling the craft together. This may have been for publicity, as his wife Josephine also declared to the reporter: “I’m scared stiff every time he tries something with it.” At the time of the interview Timewell claimed to have made ‘hundreds’ of flights, for a total of about 30 hours in the air, with the the highest flight reaching 200 feet and the longest flight lasting five minutes. This is far short of the benchmarks touted by his publicity campaign, in which he claimed the platform had a max height of 5000 feet, a max flight time of 15 minutes, and a ten mile range.

He did concede that there were some teething troubles.

• Steering by body weight had its limitations. This led to a risk of hitting obstacles like trees, and Richard Timewell’s brother cracked a rib in a landing accident.
• There was also a fire hazard, as the flaming exhaust could start fires on the ground.
• The engine controls also needed fine tuning. The cooling effect of the expanding propane in the valve could cause the throttle and the fuel lines to freeze up. Since uniform thrust from all engines was needed to ensure the platform’s stability and keep it in the air, this was worrying. If one of the engines didn’t fire, it vented unburned propane instead, which was then ignited by the exhaust of the other engines. But, as Timewell said reassuringly: “Your eyebrows will grow back.”
• Crash safety could also stand to be improved. Timewell’s plans for the next version included a roll bar and parachute that could deploy in less than a second.
• Then there was the noise, which was described as earth-shattering. You could only fly the Space Ranger with ear protection, and as Timewell said, “Your body vibrates a little inside.” During one flight on Grouse Mountain, he recalled that one hiker ran away in panic after seeing the craft roar out of the forest, without giving Timewell a chance to explain.

Timewell set up shop in Seattle’s Boeing Field and took out ads in Popular Mechanics to attract commercial interest and investment for series production. He estimated that it would cost $2.5 million (again in 1978 money) to get the Space Ranger certified by the FAA.

He attracted a lot of attention, with enquiries coming from utility companies who wanted to inspect power lines, doctors, Hollywood producers, actor Clint Walker (of Dirty Dozen fame), an Iranian construction firm, a Swiss police department, and even a funeral parlour. (I have no idea what a funeral parlour would want with the thing. Perhaps they were thinking of adding an ‘ascent in a fiery chariot’ option.)

None of these inquiries seem to have led to much in the way of actual sales or investment, and certainly not the $2.5 million Timewell was hoping for. Exactly how many units he sold is unclear. In one article he said he had only sold one unit, while in another he claimed that about fifty were being built in the US from kits and blueprints. The most likely explanation is that he sold only one kit, and the rest of his sales were blueprints. He was contacted by a Swiss manufacturer who put in an order for 50 kits to be sold in Europe, because the European market was estimated at 1,500 a year.

For all this supposed interest, I haven’t come any trace of another Space Ranger being built. And after this blaze of glory, the Space Ranger disappeared from history.

There is, however, one related event.In 1979 rocket car pilot Ed Ballinger demonstrated his Vertical Lift Monster at the Orange County Speedway in California. He had been driving dragsters powered by hydrogen peroxide rockets, so propane must have seemed relatively benign.

His platform did not achieve liftoff and quickly became engulfed in flames. Luckily, Ballinger was wearing a fireproof suit which kept him from being roasted in the process. The NHRA then threatened him with a lifelong ban from drag racing if he ever pulled a stunt like that again.

The Vertical Lift Monster was clearly much larger than the Space Ranger, but was conceptually similar and also powered by four Gluhareff rockets. Was Ed Ballinger perhaps one of the customers mentioned by Timewell? Did he tinker with the design based on his own experiences with rocket cars? He certainly seems to have increased the distance between himself and the rocket engines, which is prudent.

As the Space Ranger failed to attract any serious commercial interest, Timewell went back to Vancouver and returned to real estate, becoming president of Dogwood Realty in the 1980s.

The inventing bug hadn’t left him, though. Vancouver newspaper articles from 1994 mention a Richard Timewell who had developed an eco-friendly way to clean metal. It used an electrolytical process which he discovered while trying to find a way to produce pure hydrogen. This was marketed by a firm called Dynamotive, who proposed it as an alternative to acid-based cleaning methods. There is no mention of any previous projects of this Richard Timewell, so we can’t be 100% sure that it is the same person, but it is hard to believe there were two of them. No practical applications of the cleaning process seem to have materialised. In the 2000s Dynamotive went on to produce bio-oil by means of fast pyrolysis, and predictably went bust.

In the 1990s Timewell became president of a Vancouver based startup called Citotech Systems. Around 2000 he designed for them the ‘Microstart System’, a replacement for the conventional starter motor or battery in car engines. How this was supposed to work, is unclear. This also went nowhere.

No more inventions are recorded. Timewell continued his career in real estate, and died in Vancouver in 2012.