Request Orbital scooter

willy88

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I would like to see a sort of Heinlein-esque "scooter" type spacecraft. Basically it's just a rocket engine with a fuel tank, some seats and navigational equipment. It would be nice if it had a virtual cockpit, as well as UMMU support. Would anyone else like something like this?
 
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Well, it would have to land eventually. Unless it just shot off into orbit. But I think I know what you want. Are you talking about something similar to an airport passenger bus? One that is made for mas-transit or personal transit between buildings or for close-range?
like this?:
3.jpg
 
I'll clarify: it would be used for ship-to-ship, ship-to-station and station-to-station.
 
Bj, I think he means something that would be deployed in space, perhaps from the cargo bay of another craft, and be used to transport people between ships and stations. As unknown said, similar to an airport bus. But obviously in space.

Am I right?
 
I think he means the short-range transports from "Space Cadet". Basically it would be a Dragonfly with no cabin: a long truss with attachments for spacesuited personnel, RCS engines, a pilot station and nothing else.
 
I think he means the short-range transports from "Space Cadet". Basically it would be a Dragonfly with no cabin: a long truss with attachments for spacesuited personnel, RCS engines, a pilot station and nothing else.

Very exactly.
 
I think he means the short-range transports from "Space Cadet". Basically it would be a Dragonfly with no cabin: a long truss with attachments for spacesuited personnel, RCS engines, a pilot station and nothing else.

Heh, sorry I never saw Space Cadet. :)

Something like this?

TS0204%7ESpace-Cadet-Posters.jpg


:)
 
Well, it would have to land eventually.

Actually not. In a well developed space infrastructure, a fairly sizeable number of ships, if not a majority, would be built, flown around, and scrapped in space without once touching the surface of a planet. You'd have surface to orbit shuttles to bring things up and down, but anything built for interplanetary or ship-to-ship travel would probably not even be capable of landing. Such ships probably wouldn't even have spaceframes designed to hold up to much more than whatever fraction of a g the engine might provide, and would have no landing gear at all.

Wings, landing gear, and heavily reinforced spaceframes are all dead weight once you're in space.
 
Heh, sorry I never saw Space Cadet. :)

It's a novel, dated 1948, they never made a movie (although it inspired "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" and "Star Trek"). Check it out, it's outdated in many ways but the story is still compelling, the science realistic and the typical Heinlein good yarn.
 
It's a novel, dated 1948, they never made a movie (although it inspired "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet" and "Star Trek"). Check it out, it's outdated in many ways but the story is still compelling, the science realistic and the typical Heinlein good yarn.
Everything he wrote was good. :)
 
I'm really surprised nobody has yet suggested ... the 'Scootie-Puff Jr':
 

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Scootie-Puff Jr LOL I love that show.

If you guys recall, another version of a non-landing personal transfer vehicle was shown in the movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Scottie uses one to take Kirk for a tour around the newly-refitted Enterprise before it left the drydock.
 
Yeah, but the MMU didn't have very much delta-V. The smaller emergency jetpacks they wear outside the ISS have even less. And you can only stay in that suit for so long. For transfers to other vessels in diferent orbits you're going to need more delta-V, which means you want something with chemical reactant jets on it, probably hypergolic, as opposed to the very low Isp of the MMU's cold gas jets. That means a larger structure with bigger propellant tanks and some safe distance between the astronaut and the nearest thruster, at least a few feet. If he must ride inside his suit, then you should have a life support system on the vehicle that he can plug his suit umbilical into for air conditionaing and to preserve battery power. He also needs a way to control the vessel without removing his gloved hands or vision-restricting helmet. Anything else? Maybe a retractable sun shade made of mylar or something. Also you need to decide how many passengers this thing will carry and for how many hours. Decide how electrical power will be generated, probably solar, and determine how much area the panels require for your chosen solar cell technology, and put them somewhere, maybe on the dorsal side. These could serve as the sun shade perhaps.

Shouldn't be too hard to design a basic version once you settle on the requirements.
 
I think the future of EVAs and outside work is going to be done by anthropomorphic robots controlled by high fidelity teleoperation. Space suits are just too dangerous, limiting, and time consuming to use if a remote controlled telebot will work just as well.

When that's the case, I don't think there will be much need for pressure suits in anything but emergency situations. So a "broomstick" vehicle won't be really practical. Probably a compact "shuttle pod" is what we will see to move people around.
 
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