Space
Rocket packs can be useful for extra-vehicular activity (EVA) in outer space. While near Earth a jet pack has to produce a g-force of at least 1g (otherwise it just provides some steering capacity for the wearer while falling down to Earth). For excursions outside a free falling spaceship, even a small g-force is already sufficient for a small deviation from free fall, hence much less delta-v is consumed per unit time, and not during the whole EVA. With only small amounts of thrust needed, safety and temperature are much more manageable than in the atmosphere in Earth's gravity field.
Rocket packs were tested during mission STS-64. Mission specialists Carl Meade and Mark Lee tested the SAFER Rocket Pack while Hammond remained inside the Orbiter.
Read more about this topic: Jet Pack
Famous quotes containing the word space:
“Not so many years ago there there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel—movement through space—provided the universal metaphor for change.... One of the subtle confusions—perhaps one of the secret terrors—of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)
“The within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and the heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)