 According to the 1950s, we should all have jetpacks and flying cars by now, and if another little innovation of the space age from the mid-century had come to pass and actually made it into the mainstream, we should also have jet shoes by now. Jet shoes emerged courtesy of NASA engineer John Byrd in the early 1960s, not as something fun to play with, but as a way to give astronauts better mobility during spacewalks. No one really knew what was going to happen when an astronaut stepped outside the spacecraft, but certainly he would need some way to maneuver around, and it should be pretty easy to use, because down the line, maybe he would be building a space station in orbit. So they started looking at basic ways to increase human mobility in space outside the confines of a spacecraft, and jet shoes seemed like a really obvious solution. Byrd was inspired to pursue jet shoes after colleagues of his had proved that a jet platform would be a viable way for astronauts to maneuver. The two ideas harness the same core concept, basically that humans stand upright and know how to balance and maneuver in a standing position. So why not put the jet on the bottom of the human such that when they're in space, they can more or less be standing upright if there was an up and down in space to then move around and work outside the spacecraft. The jet shoe system was pretty simple. The bulk of the system was the external backpack that would serve as a storage assembly for the 15 pounds of oxygen stored pressurized at 6,000 pounds per square inch that would power the jets. The gas would travel through a valve to the supply lines that would bring it into the jets. Each jet would deliver a burst of the compressed gas, giving the astronaut a little bit of propulsion. The rocket nozzle unit would be worn over the astronaut's boot, basically a shoe. To control the system, the astronaut would need only wiggle his big toe. There would be a little button to depress inside his shoe that every time he hit it would send a burst of gas out the bottom of the jet at the bottom of the shoe. So all he would need to do in space would be press a toe down and he would get a little burst of speed up just like Iron Man. Everything would then be as simple as putting your feet opposite to where you wanted to go. So you wanted to move backwards, lift your feet up, put the jets there, and bam, you're going backwards. Engineers tested a number of configurations and found that the jet shoes were a viable way for astronauts to gain mobility during a spacewalk. But there were more problems than solutions when it actually came to thinking about how they would work in practice. Like could the little toe-tappy thing actually work inside a pressurized spacecraft? Not to mention the system was pretty finicky and had to be put on over a pressure suit, which could be difficult for some astronauts, and it would have to be adjusted to fit every person individually. As we know, the jet shoes never took off, quite literally. But the Langley testing did prove that little jets could be used to increase mobility on a spacewalk. This ultimately did feed into, at least in part, development of the MMU that shuttle astronauts tested in the 1980s. If you'd like to know more about bird and the jet shoes, be sure to check out my companion blog post over at Discover. And if there are other retro-futuristic technologies you'd like to know more about, leave all of your comments, thoughts, and questions down in the comments section below. As always, if you enjoyed this video, please subscribe, so you never miss an episode, and don't forget you can follow me all across social media for Vintage Space every day. I'm on Facebook, Twitter, and on Instagram. Thank you so much for watching. I'm so glad you stopped by, and I'll see you next time.