Leap Tall Buildings in a Single Bound

Well, sort of...

The PowerQuick Ascender is a device developed by the DoD to help soldiers scale vertical surfaces.

The thing can lift up to 320lbs at speeds of up to a meter per second. The idea is that you'd shoot up a grappling hook and a cable to the roof of a building and then use the PowerQuick harness thingie to quickly make your way to the top.

The military version will run on solid fuel and will hold enough of a charge to climb 250 meters!!!! For those of you not familiar with the foreign quirkiness of the metric system, that's about 820 feet, or about 2/3 the height of the Empire State Building.

The idea behind this thing was hostage rescue and urban warfare, but I think someone at DARPA secretly wants to be Batman.

Props to Reuters on this one.