Rocket designer Tim Pickens has lived the dream of many a 12-year-old boy; he has built a real rocket bike:
Pickens, president of rocket-design firm Orion Propulsion, created his first rocket bike with fellow speed enthusiast Glenn May by bolting a 35-pound-thrust rocket engine to Pickens’s bike—enough power for a gentle push down the road. That project didn’t kill anyone, so Pickens got himself another bike and stepped it up, attaching a 200-pound-thrust engine capable of blasting him from 0 to 60 miles an hour in five seconds—fast enough to beat a Porsche in a drag race. In fact, the rocket bike employs the same hybrid rocket technology as the suborbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, whose propulsion system Pickens helped design.
In place of synthetic rubber fuel, however, the bike uses ordinary roofing tar. To ignite it, Pickens placed a model-rocket motor inside the engine. A button on the handlebar fires the model-rocket motor, which in turn sets off Pickens’s larger motor by lighting the roofing-tar fuel. His next project is to build a company car: a pickup truck with a removable 2,000-pound-thrust rocket strapped into the bed.