The Ill-Fated History of the Jet Pack

The space-age invention still takes our imaginations on

our wild ride

From the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Udvar-Hazy Center (Carolyn
Russo / NASM, SI)

By Jeff MacGregor
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
June 2015

First we tried feathers and wax. Then Leonardo specified linen and wood. No matter the mythology
or the machinery, the dream has always been the same: Were flying. Floating over fields and
cities, unstuck, untroubled, cut loose from the dust. The same dream again and again since we
came out of the caves, right through Daedalus and Icarus to Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. This
Bell Aerospace rocket belt is the dream made realalbeit updated by science and science fiction.
By the late 1950s, Wendell F. Moore of Bell Aerosystems, one of the great crew-cut, pocketprotected engineers at one of the great aviation companies of the postwar jet age, went to the
drawing board and came back with the SRLD, the Small Rocket Lift Device, a Commando Codystyle backpack that could carry a single soldier into battle.
But only if that battle was about a block away.
The limiting factor for every rocket belt is the fuel load. Enough fuel to carry a flier for more than 20
seconds or so was too heavy to lift. That the SRLD worked at all was an engineering triumph. It
could fly, hover, turn, go high or low, but could travel only short distances. Still, it was beautiful.
Recognizable by its polished fuel tanks and control arms, custom-machined valves and foilwrapped exhaust nozzles, stainless hoses and fiberglass backboard, it looks like a hot-rod scuba
rig. Today, the second one ever built resides in the Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian National
Air and Space Museum (NASM).

It works by sending pressurized hydrogen peroxide through a decomposition catalystin this case
a series of fine-meshed screens made of silver. The peroxide instantly expands into superheated
steam, producing a few hundred pounds of thrust at the exhaust nozzles. These are controlled by
the pilots hand grips. Theres no aerodynamic lift; the thing stays aloft through the physics of brute
force. It has the glide angle of an Acme anvil.
By 1962 the Bell team had a patent, and a flying rocket belt. It flew in trials, in the Pentagon
courtyard, in front of President Kennedy. But as soon as you took off, you had to find a place to
land. And rocket belts are hard to build, maintain and control, expensive to fuel and relatively
dangerous. As a practical matter, theyre a failure.
But oh man, what a ride! And, NASM curator Thomas Lassman points out, every failure is a kind of
scientific necessity, leading away from what doesnt work to what does. I think there is much
historic value in this artifact because it illustrates so clearly a technological dead end, he told me,
and shows us how technological enthusiasm can fail to meet expectations. Such failures are
frequent in technological innovation.
So your commuter rocket belt isnt around the corner. It was obsolete the day it came out of the
shop. Its also not really a belt, but a pack strapped on by a harness. Rocket pack would have
been best, but somehow the shorthand term belt gained currency. Still, the device workswithin
strict limits and it speaks to the age of space travel and to the Rocketeer in every one of us.
Every so often Bell rocket belts turn up in movies and on television. Lost in Space, for example,
or Gilligans Island. The most memorable example likely being the very first, the 1965 James
Bond thriller Thunderball.
Since then, the handful of packs ever built have made it into civilian hands and become air show
mainstays and popular halftime attractions. The belts appearance at the opening ceremonies of
the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics remains its peak moment.
The crowd on its feet below you, roaring. Those awed and upturned faces! Imagine the fame, the
glory, the money! So dreamers and shade tree engineers are crazy about these things.
Down in Houston in the mid-1990s, three schemers formed what they dubbed the American Rocket
Belt Corporation. Brad Barker engineered it in Joe Wrights workshop. Thomas Larry Stanley
bankrolled it. They built a rocket belt that extended the time aloft from 20 seconds or so to around
30.
But the partnership came apart over money. The belt disappeared. Wright wound up murdered (the
case remains unsolved). Barker was abducted by Stanley, who tried to force his hostage to reveal
the rocket belts whereabouts. Stanley ended up in prison. No one has seen the device since 1995.
The broad outlines of the dark tale are found in Pretty Bird, a regrettable 2008 movie starring Paul
Giamatti.
Better to see the Bell rocket belt in the new traveling exhibition, Above and Beyond, opening at
NASM in August. Because even in our jaded age, the jet pack still fires the imagination. Its just
one more future that never got here from the past.

One Man's Lifelong Pursuit of Pluto

is About to Get Real
When the New Horizons spacecraft races by the quasiplanetary body, Alan Stern will have finally met his
match

The last of the data from the New Horizons flyby wont arrive until late 2016. (Johns Hopkins
University Applied physics laboratory/ Southwest Research Institute)
By Michael Lemonick
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
June 2015

On July 14 at approximately 8 a.m. Eastern time, a half-ton NASA spacecraft that has been racing
across the solar system for nine and a half years will finally catch up with tiny Pluto, at three billion
miles from the Sun the most distant object that anyone or anything from Earth has ever visited.
Invisible to the naked eye, Pluto wasnt even discovered until 1930, and has been regarded as our
solar systems oddball ever since, completely different from the rocky planets close to the Sun,
Earth included, and equally unlike the outer gas giants. This quirky and mysterious little world will
swing into dramatic view as the New Horizons spacecraft makes its closest approach, just 6,000
miles away, and onboard cameras snap thousands of photographs. Other instruments will gauge
Plutos topography, surface and atmospheric chemistry, temperature, magnetic field and more.
New Horizons will also take a hard look at Plutos five known moons, including Charon, the largest.
It might even find other moons, and maybe a ring or two.
It was barely 20 years ago when scientists first learned that Pluto, far from alone at the edge of the
solar system, was just one in a vast swarm of small frozen bodies in wide, wide orbit around the

Sun, like a ring of debris left at the outskirts of a construction zone. That insight, among others, has
propelled the New Horizons mission. Understand Pluto and how it fits in with those remnant
bodies, scientists say, and you can better understand the formation and evolution of the solar
system itself.
If all goes well, encounter day, as the New Horizons team calls it, will be a cork-popping
celebration of tremendous scientific and engineering prowessits no small feat to fling a collection
of precision instruments through the frigid void at speeds up to 47,000 miles an hour to rendezvous
nearly a decade later with an icy sphere about half as wide as the United States is broad. The day
will also be a sweet vindication for the leader of the mission, Alan Stern. A 57-year-old astronomer,
aeronautical engineer, would-be astronaut and self-described rabble-rouser, Stern has spent the
better part of his career fighting to get Pluto the attention he thinks it deserves. He began pushing
NASA to approve a Pluto mission nearly a quarter of a century ago, then watched in frustration as
the agency gave the green light to one Pluto probe after another, only to later cancel them. It was
incredibly frustrating, he says, like watching Lucy yank the football away from Charlie Brown, over
and over. Finally, Stern recruited other scientists and influential senators to join his lobbying effort,
and because underdog Pluto has long been a favorite of children, proponents of the mission
savvily enlisted kids to write to Congress, urging that funding for the spacecraft be approved.
New Horizons mission control is headquartered at Johns Hopkins Universitys Applied Physics
Laboratory near Baltimore, where Stern and several dozen other Plutonians will be installed for
weeks around the big July event, but I caught up with Stern late last year in Boulder at the
Southwest Research Institute, where he is an associate vice president for research and
development. A picture window in his impressive office looks out onto the Rockies, where he often
goes to hike and unwind. Trim and athletic at 5-foot-4, hes also a runner, a sport he pursues with
the exactitude of, well, a rocket scientist. He has calculated his stride rate, and says (only halfjoking) that hed be world-class if only his legs were longer. It wouldnt be an overstatement to say
that he is a polarizing figure in the planetary science community; his single-minded pursuit of Pluto
has annoyed some colleagues. So has his passionate defense of Pluto in the years since
astronomy officials famously demoted it to a dwarf planet, giving it the bums rush out of the
exclusive solar system club, now limited to the eight biggies.
The timing of that insult, which is how Stern and other jilted Pluto-lovers see it, could not have
been more dramatic, coming in August 2006, just months after New Horizons had rocketed into
space from Cape Canaveral. What makes Plutos demotion even more painfully ironic to Stern is
that some of the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that he had predicted greatly strengthened
his opponents arguments, all while opening the door to a new age of planetary science. In fact,
Stern himself used the term dwarf planet as early as the 1990s.
The wealthy astronomer Percival Lowell, widely known for insisting there were artificial canals on
Mars, first started searching for Pluto at his private observatory in Arizona in 1905. Careful study of
planetary orbits had suggested that Neptune was not the only object out there exerting a
gravitational tug on Uranus, and Lowell set out to find what he dubbed Planet X. He died without
success, but a young man named Clyde Tombaugh, who had a passion for astronomy though no
college education, arrived at the observatory and picked up the search in 1929. After 7,000 hours
staring at some 90 million star images, he caught sight of a new planet on his photographic plates
in February 1930. The name Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, was suggested by an 11year-old British girl named Venetia Burney, who had been discussing the discovery with her
grandfather. The name was unanimously adopted by the Lowell Observatory staff in part because
the first two letters are Percival Lowells initials.

Plutos solitary nature baffled scientists for decades. Shouldnt there be other, similar objects out
beyond Neptune? Why did the solar system appear to run out of material so abruptly? It seemed

just weird that the outer solar system would be so empty, while the inner solar system was filled
with planets and asteroids, recalls David Jewitt, a planetary scientist at UCLA. Throughout the
decades various astronomers proposed that there were smaller bodies out there, yet unseen.
Comets that periodically sweep in to light up the night sky, they speculated, probably hailed from a
belt or disk of debris at the solar systems outer reaches.
Stern, in a paper published in 1991 in the journal Icarus, argued not only that the belt existed, but
also that it contained things as big as Pluto. They were simply too far away, and too dim, to be
easily seen. His reasoning: Neptunes moon Triton is a near-twin of Pluto, and probably orbited the
Sun before it was captured by Neptunes gravity. Uranus has a drastically tilted axis of rotation,
probably due to a collision eons ago with a Pluto-size object. That made three Pluto-like objects at
least, which suggested to Stern there had to be more. The number of planets in the solar system
would someday need to be revised upward, he thought. There were probably hundreds, with the
majority, including Pluto, best assigned to a subcategory of dwarf planets.
Just a year later, the first object (other than Pluto and Charon) was discovered in that faraway
region, called the Kuiper Belt after the Dutch-born astronomer Gerard Kuiper. Found by Jewitt and
his colleague, Jane Luu, its only about 100 miles across, while Pluto spans 1,430 miles. A decade
later, Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Chad Trujillo discovered an object about half the size
of Pluto, large enough to be spherical, which they named Quaoar (pronounced kwa-war and
named for the creator god in the mythology of the pre-Columbian Tongva people native to the Los
Angeles basin). It was followed in quick succession by Haumea, and in 2005, Browns group found
Eris, about the same size as Pluto and also spherical.
Planetary scientists have spotted many hundreds of smaller Kuiper Belt Objects; there could be as
many as ten billion that are a mile across or more. Stern will take a more accurate census of their
sizes with the cameras on New Horizons. His simple idea is to map and measure Plutos and
Charons craters, which are signs of collisions with other Kuiper Belt Objects and thus serve as a
representative sample. When Pluto is closest to the Sun, frozen surface material evaporates into a
temporary atmosphere, some of which escapes into space. This escape erosion can erase older
craters, so Pluto will provide a recent census. Charon, without this erosion, will offer a record that
spans cosmic history. In one leading theory, the original, much denser Kuiper Belt would have
formed dozens of planets as big or bigger than Earth, but the orbital changes of Jupiter and Saturn
flung most of the building blocks away before that could happen, nipping planet formation in the
bud.
By the time New Horizons launched at Cape Canaveral on January 19, 2006, it had become
difficult to argue that Pluto was materially different from many of its Kuiper Belt neighbors.
Curiously, no strict definition of planet existed at the time, so some scientists argued that there
should be a size cutoff, to avoid making the list of planets too long. If you called Pluto and the other
relatively small bodies something else, youd be left with a nice tidy eight planetsMercury through
Neptune. In 2000, Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, had
famously chosen the latter option, leaving Pluto out of a solar system exhibit.
Then, with New Horizons less than 15 percent of the way to Pluto, members of the International
Astronomical Union, responsible for naming and classifying celestial objects, voted at a meeting in
Prague to make that arrangement official. Pluto and the others were now to be known as dwarf
planets, which, in contrast to Sterns original meaning, were not planets. They were an entirely
different sort of beast. Because he discovered Eris, Caltechs Brown is sometimes blamed for the
demotion. He has said he would have been fine with either outcome, but he did title his 2010
memoir How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.
Its embarrassing, recalls Stern, who wasnt in Prague for the vote. Its wrong scientifically and
its wrong pedagogically. He said the same sort of things publicly at the time, in language thats
unusually blunt in the world of science. Among the dumbest arguments for demoting Pluto and the
others, Stern noted, was the idea that having 20 or more planets would be somehow inconvenient.

Also ridiculous, he says, is the notion that a dwarf planet isnt really a planet. Is a dwarf evergreen
not an evergreen? he asks.
Sterns barely concealed contempt for what he considers foolishness of the bureaucratic and
scientific varieties hasnt always endeared him to colleagues. One astronomer I asked about Stern
replied, My mother taught me that if you cant say anything nice about someone, dont say
anything. Another said, His last name is Stern. That tells you all you need to know.
DeGrasse Tyson, for his part, offers measured praise: When it comes to everything from rousing
public sentiment in support of astronomy to advocating space science missions to defending Pluto,
Alan Stern is always there.
Stern also inspires less reserved admiration. Alan is incredibly creative and incredibly energetic,
says Richard Binzel, an MIT planetary scientist who has known Stern since their graduate-school
days. I dont know where he gets it.
**********
Stern grew up in New Orleans and later Dallas. His father was a business executive and his
mother stayed at home with Alan and his two siblings. Alan was 100 percent consumed with
space travel by the age of 8, recalls his younger brother Hap, an attorney in Dallas. He wanted
more than anything to be an astronaut.By the time Stern went to college, in 1975, the Apollo
program had ended and the first space shuttle launch was several years away, but after spending
an undergraduate year or two as a slackerhis wordhe began working to become exactly what
NASA would expect of its astronaut candidates: an overachiever. I made straight As from that
point on, he says, graduating from the University of Texas at Austin with degrees in physics and
astronomy. His extracurriculars, too, were astronaut-friendly: He got his pilots license, became a
flight instructor
People make vows like this all the time. Theyre far easier to make than to keepespecially when
your career goal is something as unrealistically romantic as becoming an astronaut. and learned to
skydive and scuba dive.
He stayed on at Austin and picked up masters degrees in aerospace engineering and planetary
atmospheres. He took a job as an engineer at the aerospace company Martin Marietta, working on
various satellite programs. Then he moved to the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics
at the University of Colorado, in Boulder, where he designed and oversaw an instrument for a
satellite intended to study Halleys Comet during its 1986 visit. That satellite, though, was aboard
the space shuttle Challenger when the ship exploded on January 28, 1986, killing its sevenmember crew and putting the U.S. human spaceflight program on hiatus.
Stern had become intrigued by comets, and ended up writing a doctoral dissertation on the
evolution of those icy bodies, and he devised instruments to study them. His ultraviolet
spectrograph would capture light bouncing off a comets temporary atmosphere to find out what it
was made of. Last year, when the European Space Agencys Rosetta probe became the first ever
to orbit a comet, one of Sterns UV spectrographs found the surface of the comet surprisingly
devoid of water ice.
Given that extraordinary accomplishment, Nothing if not relentless, Stern applied to the astronaut
corps three times after the shuttle had started flying again in 1988, and was even selected as one
of 130 among thousands of applicants to come to Houston to interview. In the end, he wasnt
chosen. But he hoped hed get another shot when Comet Hale-Bopp lit up the night sky in 1997.
He adapted one of his instruments to ride on the shuttleand who better to operate it, he was
convinced, than Stern himself? NASA threw the decision over to a committee of astronauts, who
decided his expertise would be essential, and he was elated to be heading for space at last.
At the last minute, however, NASA put a Canadian astronaut on the flight, bumping Stern off. It
bothers him even today to recall his disappointment. I was very upset because I realized there

was no...the time was running out. There was no way that I...it was all done. It was a done deal. Its
the only time in my life I ever cried over something about work, he says. I mean I just lost it.
But it didnt slow him down. In addition to overseeing missions, and a brief stint as NASAs
associate administrator for science, he co-founded a company called Uwingu, which raises money
for astronomy activities by (unofficially) selling the naming rights to exoplanets and craters on
Mars. He also co-founded World View, which plans to take tourists to the edge of space in highaltitude balloons, and another company, called Golden Spike, to sell Moon missions to countries
that want to go there. And one project could achieve his dream of going into space himself. He and
his team at Southwest have designed instruments for suborbital spaceflights planned by the private
companies Virgin Galactic and XCOR Aerospace. Scientists will need to run the instruments, and,
Stern says, Weve bought a total of nine seats, on separate flights. He is determined to occupy
several of them.
**********
There is another cause, however, that obsesses him even more passionately than traveling to
space. Even in grad school, said Binzel, when I met up with him in Boulder, Alan was talking to
me about it. Hes like Luke Skywalker. Then, in a spot-on Darth Vader imitation: Exploring
Pluto...is your destiny.
Planetary scientists have learned only a few things about Pluto since its discovery: Theyve pinned
down its 248-year orbit, and close observations of how Pluto and Charon circle each other have
yielded their sizes and masses. From these, compositions can be predicteda mixture of rock and
ice. The bulk of the ice on both is frozen water, while the ice coating Plutos surface is mostly
frozen nitrogen. Surface temperatures hover around minus-380-degrees Fahrenheit.
New Horizons is expected to reveal much more. Visible light cameras will not only count craters,
but also map hills, valleys, cliffs and cracks smaller than a football field. Infrared sensors will show
variations in surface temperature, perhaps revealing warm spots that suggest geologic activity.
One set of instruments will analyze the chemical makeup of the surface, while another, similar to
the spectrograph aboard Rosetta, will study the temporary atmosphere.
The list of questions is nearly endless. Does Pluto have an ocean of liquid water beneath its icy
surface, for example, like those on the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn? Does that ocean feed
geysers that spray off into space? Why does Pluto have a higher proportion of rock under the ice
than Charon?
And then there are the questions the scientists dont even know enough to be asking. The big
lesson of planetary science, says Stern, is when you do a first reconnaissance of a new kind of
object, you should expect the unexpected.
Come encounter day, Sterns wife, Carole, and their three children, along with parents, siblings,
nieces and nephews, and several cousins, will join him at mission headquarters. I cant imagine
not being there, says Sterns youngest daughter, Kate, 24. Its like if youre married and your wife
gives birth and you dont show up.
Already the spacecrafts approach is making news. In April, NASA released the first color images of
Pluto and Charon from New Horizons. The best photographs are yet to come. Some Pluto lovers
have speculated that, in bringing this blurry blob into focus, New Horizons might find a reason to
restore its planetary status. Its a romantic notion, but Stern isnt convinced. He is focused instead
on the details of the encounter, on the data already streaming in and on a new understanding of an
object that has captivated his attention for more than two decades, and mystified the world for eight
and a half. It says something very deep about humans and our society, something very good
about us, that weve invested our time and treasure in building a machine that can fly across three
billion miles of space to explore the Pluto system. But, he continues, it makes it hard to celebrate

and appreciate that accomplishment in the context of a constant discussion about the demotion of
Pluto.

What Makes the "Lion Whisperer"

Roar?
He's famous for getting dangerously close to his
fearsome charges, but what can Kevin Richardson
teach us about ethical conservationand ourselves?

By Susan Orlean
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
June 2015

One recent morning, Kevin Richardson hugged a lion and then turned away to check something on
his phone. The lion, a 400-pound male with paws the size of dinner plates, leaned against
Richardsons shoulder and gazed magnificently into middle space. A lioness lolled a few feet away.
She yawned and stretched her long tawny body, swatting lazily at Richardsons thigh. Without
taking his eyes from his phone screen, Richardson shrugged her off. The male lion, now having
completed his moment of contemplation, began gnawing on Richardsons head.

If you were present during this scene, unfolding on a grassy plain in a northeast corner of South
Africa, this would be exactly when you would appreciate the sturdiness of the security fence that
stood between you and the pair of lions. Even so, you might take a quick step back when one of
the animals turned its attention away from Richardson and for an instant locked eyes with you.
Then, noting which side of the fence Richardson was on, you might understand why so many
people place bets on when he will be eaten alive.
**********
Richardson was referred to as the lion whisperer by a British newspaper in 2007, and the name
stuck. There is probably no one in the world with a more recognized relationship with wild cats. The
most popular YouTube video of Richardson frolicking with his lions has been viewed more than 25
million times and has more than 11,000 comments. The scope of reactions is epic, ranging from
awe to respect to envy to bafflement: If he does die he will die in his own heaven doing what he
loves and This guy chilling with lions like theyre rabbits and many versions of I want to get to do
what he does.
The first time I saw one of Richardsons videos, I was transfixed. After all, every fiber in our being
tells us not to cozy up with animals as dangerous as lions. When someone defies that instinct, it
seizes our attention like a tightrope walker without a net. I was puzzled by how Richardson
managed it, but just as much by why. Was he a daredevil with a higher threshold for fear and
danger than most people? That might explain it if he were dashing in and out of a lions den on a
dare, performing a version of seeing how long you can hold your hand in a flame. But its clear that
Richardsons lions dont plan to eat him, and that his encounters arent desperate scrambles to
stay a step ahead of their claws. They snuggle up to him, as lazy as house cats. They nap in a pile
with him. They arent tamehe is the only person they tolerate peaceably. They simply seem to
have accepted him in some way, as if he were an odd, furless, human-shaped lion.
How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets and naturalists for ages. With
their parallel and unknowable lives, animals offer us relationships that exist in the realm of silence
and mystery, distinct from those we have with others of our own species. A rapport with
domesticated animals is familiar to all of us, but anyone who can have that kind of relationship with
wild animals seems exceptional, perhaps a little mad. Some years ago, I read a book by the writer
J. Allen Boone in which he detailed his connection with all manner of creatures, including a skunk
and the actor dog Strongheart. Boone was especially proud of the friendship he developed with a
housefly he named Freddie. Whenever Boone wanted to spend time with Freddie, he had only to
send out a mental call and Freddie would appear. The man and his fly did household chores and
listened to the radio together. Like Richardsons lions, Freddie wasnt tamehe had an exclusive
relationship with Boone. In fact, when an acquaintance of Boones insisted on seeing Freddie so
he could experience this connection, the fly seemed to sulk and refused to be touched.
Befriending a housefly, crazy as it seems, raises the question of what it means when we bond
across species. Is there anything to it beyond the amazing fact that it has been accomplished? Is it
a mere oddity, a performance that is revealed to signify nothing special or important after the
novelty has worn off? Does it violate something fundamentala sense that wild things should eat
us or sting us or at least avoid us, not snuggle usor is it valuable because it reminds us of a
continuity with living creatures that is easily forgotten?
**********
Because of his great naturalness with wildlife, you might expect that Richardson grew up in the
bush, but he is the product of a Johannesburg suburb with sidewalks and streetlamps and not even
a whiff of jungle. The first time he laid eyes on a lion was on a first-grade field trip to the
Johannesburg Zoo. (He was impressed, but he also remembers thinking it odd that the king of the
jungle existed in such reduced circumstances.) He found his way to animals anyway. He was the

kind of kid who kept frogs in his pockets and baby birds in shoeboxes, and he mooned over books
like Memories of a Game Ranger, Harry Wolhuters account of 44 years as a ranger in Kruger
National Park.
Richardson was a rebellious youngster, a hell-raiser. He is now 40 years old, married and the
father of two young children, but it is still easy to picture him as a joy-riding teenager, rolling cars
and slamming back beers. During that period, animals were pushed to the margins of his life, and
he came back to them in an unexpected way. In high school, he dated a girl whose parents
included him on family trips to national parks and game reserves, which reignited his passion for
wildlife. The girls father was a South African karate champion, and he encouraged Richardson to
take up physical fitness. Richardson embraced it so enthusiastically that, when he didnt get
accepted to veterinary school, he decided to get a degree in physiology and anatomy instead. After
college, while working in a gym as a trainer, he became friendly with a client named Rodney Fuhr,
who had made a fortune in retail. Like Richardson, he was keen on animals. In 1998, Fuhr bought
a faded tourist attraction called Lion Park, and he urged Richardson to come see it. Richardson
says he knew little about lions at the time, and his first trip to the park was a revelation. I met two
7-month-old cubs, Tau and Napoleon, he says. I was mesmerized and terrified, but most of all, I
had a really profound experience. I visited those cubs every day for the next eight months.
**********
When you visit Richardson in the Dinokeng Game Reserve, now home to a wildlife sanctuary that
bears his name, you have little hope for uninterrupted sleep. The lions wake up early, and their
roars rumble and thunder through the air when the sky is still black with night.
Richardson wakes up early, too. He is dark-haired and bright-eyed, and has the handsome,
rumpled look of an actor in an after-shave commercial. His energy is impressive. When he isnt
running around with lions, he likes to ride motorcycles and fly small planes. He is the first to admit
to a hardy appetite for adrenaline and a tendency to do things to an extreme. He is also capable of
great tenderness, cooing and sweet-talking his lions. On my first morning at the reserve,
Richardson hurried me over to meet two of his favorite lions, Meg and Ami, whom he has known
since they were cubs at Lion Park. Such a pretty, pretty, pretty girl, he murmured to Ami, and for a
moment, it was like listening to a little boy whispering to a kitten.
When Lion Park first opened, in 1966, it was revolutionary. Unlike zoos of that era, with their small,
bare enclosures, Lion Park allowed visitors to drive through a property where wildlife wandered
loose. The array of African plains animals, including giraffes, rhinoceroses, elephants,
hippopotamuses, wildebeests and a variety of cats, had once thrived in the area, but the park is on
the outskirts of Johannesburg, an enormous urban area, and over the previous century most of the
land in the region has been developed for housing and industry. The rest has been divvied up into
cattle ranches, and fences and farmers have driven the large game animals away. Lions, in
particular, were long gone.
Once enjoying the widest global range of almost any land mammal, lions now live only in subSaharan Africa (there is also a remnant population in India). In the last 50 years, the number of wild
lions in Africa has dropped by at least two-thirds, from 100,000 or more in the 1960s (some
estimates are as high as 400,000) to perhaps 32,000 today. Apart from Amur tigers, lions are the
largest cats on earth, and they hunt large prey, so the lion ecosystem needs open territory that is
increasingly scarce. As apex predators, lions have no predators of their own. What accounts for
their disappearance, in part, is that they have been killed by farmers when theyve ventured onto
ranch land, but most of all, they have been squeezed out of existence as the open spaces have
vanished. In most of Africa, there are far more lions in captivity than in the wild. Lion Park had to be
stocked with animals; its pride of Panthera leo were retired circus lions who had probably never
seen a natural environment in their lives.

The most popular feature at Lion Park wasnt the safari drive; it was Cub World, where visitors
could hold and pet lion cubs. And no one could resist it. Unlike lots of other animals that could
easily kill usalligators, say, or poisonous snakeslions are gorgeous, with soft faces and snub
noses and round, babyish ears. As cubs, they are docile enough for anyone to cuddle. Once the
cubs are too big and strong to be held, at around 6 months, they often graduate to a lion walk,
where, for an additional fee, visitors can stroll beside them in the open. By the time the lions are 2
years old, though, they are too dangerous for any such interactions. A few might be introduced to a
parks wild pride, but simple math tells the real story: Very quickly, there are more adult lions than
there is room in the park.
Richardson became obsessed with the young lions and spent as much time as he could at Cub
World. He discovered he had a knack for relating to them that was different and deeper than what
the rest of the visitors and staff had; the animals seemed to respond to his confidence and his
willingness to roar and howl his version of lion language. Lions are the most social of big cats,
living in groups and collaborating on hunting, and they are extremely responsive to touch and
attention. Richardson played with the cubs as if he were another lion, tumbling and wrestling and
nuzzling. He got bitten and clawed and knocked over frequently, but he felt the animals accepted
him. The relationship sustained him. I can relate to feeling so alone that you are happiest with
animals, he says. He became most attached to Tau and Napoleon, and to Meg and Ami. He
began spending so much time at the park that Fuhr gave him a job.
At first, Richardson didnt think about what became of the lions that had aged out of petting and
walking. He says he remembers vague mention of a farm somewhere where the surplus lions
lived, but he admits that he let naivet and willful denial keep him from considering it further. One
thing is certain: None of the Cub World animalsor any cubs from similar petting farms popping up
around South Africawere successfully introduced to the wild. Having been handled since birth,
they were not fit for living independently. Even if they were, there was nowhere for them to be
released. South Africas wild lions are sequestered in national parks, where they are monitored and
managed to assure they have sufficient range and prey. Each park has as many lions as it can
accommodate. There is no spare room at all, and this presents a counterintuitive proposition: that
successful lion conservation depends not on increasing the lion population but in recognizing that it
is already probably too large for the dwindling habitats that can sustain it. Lions are not in short
supply; space for them to live wild, however, is.
Some of the surplus animals from petting facilities end up in zoos and circuses; others are sent to
Asia, where their bones are used in folk medicine. Many are sold to one of the roughly 180
registered lion breeders in South Africa, where they are used to produce more cubs. Cub petting is
a profitable business, but there is a constant need for new cubs, since each one can be used only
for a few months. According to critics, breeders remove newborns from their mothers shortly after
birth, so the females can be bred again immediately, rather than waiting for them to go through
nursing and weaning. Of the approximately 6,000 captive lions in South Africa, most live in
breeding farms, cycling through pregnancy over and over again.
The rest of the extra lions end up as trophies in commercial hunts, in which they are held in a
fenced area so they have no chance to escape; sometimes they are sedated so that they are
easier targets. These canned hunts charge up to $40,000 to hunt a male lion, and around
$8,000 for a female. The practice is big business in South Africa, where it brings in nearly a
hundred million dollars a year. Up to 1,000 lions are killed in canned hunts in South Africa annually.
The hunters come from all over the world, but most are from the United States. In an email, Fuhr
acknowledged that cubs raised at Lion Park had in the past ended up as trophies in canned hunts.
He expressed regret and said that he has instituted strict new policies to ensure the best that is
possible that no lions end up at hunting operations.
**********

One day, Richardson arrived at Lion Park and discovered that Meg and Ami were gone. The parks
manager told him that they had been sold to a breeding farm. After Richardson made a fuss, Fuhr
finally agreed to arrange for their return. Richardson raced to retrieve them from the farm that he
says was an astonishing sighta vast sea of lionesses in crowded corrals. This was Richardsons
moment of reckoning: He realized he had no control over the fate of the animals he was so
attached to. Cub petting provided financial incentive to breed captive lions, resulting in semi-tame
cubs who had no reasonable future anywhere. He was part of a cycle that was dooming endless
numbers of animals. But, he says, Selfishly, I wanted to keep my relationship with my lions.
Thanks to a television special featuring him in one of his lion embraces, Richardson had begun to
attract international attention. He was now in an untenable position, celebrating the magnificence
of lions but doing so by demonstrating an unusual ease with them, something that seemed to
glorify the possibility of taming them. And he was doing so while working at a facility that
contributed to their commodification. At the same time, he felt directly responsible for 32 lions, 15
hyenas and four black leopards, and had no place for them to go. I started thinking, How do I
protect these animals? he says.
In 2005, Fuhr began working on a film called White Lion, about an outcast lion facing hardship on
the African plains, and Richardson, who was co-producing it and managing the animal actors,
traded his fee for half-ownership in his menagerie. With Fuhrs approval, he moved them from Lion
Park to a farm nearby. In time, though, his relationship with Fuhr came undone, and Richardson
finally left his job at Lion Park. He viewed it as a chance to reinvent himself. While he had become
famous because of his ability to, in effect, tame lions, he wanted to work for the goal of keeping
wild ones wild. Its a balancing act, one that could be criticized as a case of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do,
and Richardson is aware of the contradictions. His explanation is that his lions are exceptional,
formed by the exceptional circumstances in which they were raised. They shouldnt be a model for
future lion-human interactions.
If I didnt utilize my relationship with the lions to better the situation of all lions, it would just be selfindulgent, Richardson says. But my celebrity, my ability to interact with the lions, has meant Ive
had more impact on lion conservation. He believes that helping people appreciate the animals
even if its in the form of fantasizing about hugging onewill ultimately motivate them to oppose
hunting and support protection.
A few years ago, Richardson met Gerald Howell, who, along with his family, owned a farm abutting
Dinokeng Game Reserve, the largest wildlife preserve in the Johannesburg area. The Howells and
many nearby farmers had taken down the fences between their properties and the park, effectively
adding huge amounts of land to the 46,000-acre reserve. Now the Howells run a safari camp for
visitors to Dinokeng. Howell offered Richardson a section of his farm for his animals. After building
shelters and enclosures on the Howell farm for his lions, hyenas and leopards, Richardson moved
them to what he hopes will be their permanent home.
**********
There was rain in the forecast the week I visited, and every morning the clouds draped down,
swollen and gray, but it was still nice enough weather for taking a lion out on a walk. Richardsons
animals live in simple, spacious enclosures. They arent free to roam at will, because they cant mix
with Dinokengs population of wild lions, but Richardson tries to make up for that by taking them
out in the park frequently, letting them roam under his supervision. In a way, Im a glorified jailer,
he says. But I try to give them the best quality of life they can possibly have. After a lion-roar
wake-up call, Richardson and I left the safari camp and drove across Dinokengs rumpled plains of
yellow grass and acacia trees and black, bubbling termite hills. Bush willows uprooted by foraging
elephants were piled like pickup sticks beside the road. In the distance, a giraffe floated by, its
head level with the treetops.

That day, it was Gabby and Bobcats turn for a walk, and as soon as they saw Richardsons truck
pulling up they crowded up to the fence, pacing and panting. They seemed to radiate heat; the air
pulsed with the tangy scent of their sweat. Hello, my boy, Richardson said, ruffling Bobcats
mane. Bobcat ignored him, blinking deeply, shifting just enough to allow Richardson room to sit
down. Gabby, who is excitable and rascally, flung herself on Richardson, wrapping her massive
front legs around his shoulders. Oof, Richardson said, getting his balance. OK, yes, hello, hello
my girl. He tussled with her for a moment and pushed her down. Then he checked an app on his
phone to see where Dinokengs eight wild lions had congregated that morning. Each of the wild
lions wears a radio collar that transmits its location; the lions show up as little red dots on the map.
Lions, in spite of their social nature, are ruthlessly territorial, and fighting among rival prides is one
of the leading causes of death. We definitely dont want to run into the wild lions when we take
these guys out for a walk, Richardson said. Otherwise, that would be curtains. A bloodbath.
After setting our course, Richardson loaded Gabby and Bobcat into a trailer and we headed into
the park, the truck juttering and clattering in the ruts in the road. Guinea fowl, their blue heads
bobbing, strutted in manic circles in front of us, and a family of warthogs scampered by, bucking
and squealing. At a clearing, we rolled to a stop, and Richardson climbed out and opened the
trailer. The lions jumped down, landing without a sound, and then bounded away. A herd of
waterbuck grazing in the scrub nearby spun to attention, flashing their white rumps. They froze,
staring hard, moon-faced and vigilant. Occasionally, Richardsons lions have caught prey on their
walks, but most of the time they stalk and then lose interest, and come running back to him. More
often, they stalk the tires on the truck, which apparently is good fun if youre looking to bite
something squishy.
I asked why the lions dont just take off once they are loose in the park. Probably because they
know where they get food, and just out of habit, Richardson said. Then he grinned and added, Id
like to think its also because they love me. We watched Gabby inch toward the waterbuck and
then explode into a run. The herd scattered, and she wheeled around and headed back toward
Richardson. She heaved herself at him, 330 muscular pounds going full-speed, and even though I
had seen him do this many times, and watched all the videos of him in many such energetic
encounters, and had heard him explain how he trusts the lions and they trust him, my heart
lurched, and for a split second the sheer illogic of a man and a lion in a warm embrace rattled
around in my head. Richardson cradled Gabby for a moment, saying, Thats my girl, thats my
girl. Then he dropped her down and tried to direct her attention to Bobcat, who was rubbing his
back against an acacia tree nearby. Gabby, go ahead, he said, nudging her. Go, go, my girl, go!
She headed back to Bobcat, and the two of them trotted down the path, away from us, small birds
bursting out of the brush as they passed by. They moved quickly, confidently, and for a moment it
looked as if they were on their own, lording over the landscape. It was a beautiful illusion, because
even if they forsook their relationship with Richardson and ran off they would soon come to the
fenced perimeter of the park, and their journey would end. And those constraints are not just
present here in Dinokeng: all of South Africas wilderness areas, like many throughout Africa, are
fenced in, and all of the animals in them are, to some extent, managedtheir roaming contained,
their numbers monitored. The hand of humanity lies heavily on even the farthest reaches of the
most remote-seeming bush. We have ended up mediating almost every aspect of the natural
world, muddling the notion of what being truly wild can really mean anymore.
Rain began to dribble down from the darkening sky and a light wind picked up, scattering bits of
brush and leaves. Richardson checked his watch, and then hooted to the lions. They circled back,
took a swipe at the truck tires, and then hopped into the trailer for the ride home. Once they were
locked in, Richardson handed me a treat to feed to Gabby. I held my hand flat against the bars of
the trailer and she scooped the meat away with her tongue. After she swallowed, she fixed one
golden eye on me, took my measure, and then slowly turned away.
**********

Richardson would like to make himself obsolete. He imagines a world in which we do not meddle
with wild animals at all, no longer creating misfits that are neither wild nor tame, out of place in any
context. In such a world, lions would have enough space to be free, and places like his sanctuary
wouldnt be necessary. He says that if cub petting and canned hunting were stopped immediately,
he would give up all of his lions. He means this as a way to illustrate his commitment to abolishing
the practices rather than it being an actual possibility, since cub petting and canned hunting arent
likely to be stopped any time soon, and in reality his lions will be dependent on him for the rest of
their lives. They have all known him since they were a few months old. But now most of them are
middle-aged or elderly, ranging from 5 to 17 years old. A few, including Napoleon, the first lion who
enchanted him at Cub World, have died. Since he has no plans to acquire young lions, though, at
some point they will all be gone.
Sometimes, in spite of your firmest intentions, plans change. A few months ago, Richardson was
contacted by a lion rescue organization, which had seized two malnourished lion cubs from a
theme park in Spain and hoped he would provide a home for them. He first said no, but then
relented, in part because he knew the cubs would never be entirely healthy and would have a hard
time finding another place to go. He is proud of how theyve thrived since they came to Dinokeng,
and when we stopped by their nursery later that day, it was clear how much he loved being near
them. Watching him with lions is a strange and marvelous sort of magic trickyou dont quite
believe your eyes, and youre not even sure what it is that youre seeing, but you thrill to the mere
sight of it and the possibility that it implies. The cubs, George and Yame, tumbled on the ground,
clawing at Richardsons shoes and chewing on his laces. After them, thats it, he said, shaking his
head. Twenty years from now, the other lions will be gone, and George and Yame will be old. Ill
be 60. He started laughing. I dont want to be jumped on by lions when Im 60! He leaned down
and scratched Georges belly, and then said, I think Ive come a long way. I dont need to hug
every lion I see.