Watching the 10th anniversary episode of Mythbusters, and in honor of that landmark I’m reposting what I had to say about the JATO rocket urban myth in The Twentysomething Guide to Creative Self-Employment, eight years pre-Mythbusters:

A story was going around the Internet a while ago about some total schmuck in Arizona who had no idea what he was getting himself into. Apparently, this Einstein decided that he wanted to drive really fast. So he somehow laid his hands on a solid-fuel Jet-Assist Takeoff (JATO) booster rocket, which he then soldered onto the underside of his Chevy. Then he found himself a really long, straight road, and set the rocket off.

Now, this guy was smart enough to smuggle military hardware. He was smart enough to attach the rocket to his car so that it didn’t blow apart the car when it went off. And he knew to do this out in Arizona, which is basically just long expanses of sand broken up by the occasional retirement community—the inhabitants of which must have been very amused to see a Chevy blow by at three hundred miles per hour.

This guy was clueless, however, on two key factors. One, the JATO rocket has no off switch. Two, Chevys aren’t supposed to go much over sixty, and their brakes and steering wheels tend to fail at ICBM cruising velocities. Which is why the guy was scraped off the side of a small hill with a putty knife.
The moral of the story? Hell, it doesn’t really need one. But if I had to say, it’s a case of classic half-assed burnout.”

I’m realizing that after a few modifications to this site, I haven’t checked to see if any of the PDF links to The Twentysomething Guide still work. So if you want to read the whole book, here it is again (8.5 megabyte PDF).