![]() Hydrazine thrusters are used for maneuvers in space. The Ranger is driven by a combination of chemical rockets and plasma jets. ![]() Each ranger has its own cryo-sleep tanks for long duration missions. The Ranger can carry a crew of four people and one robot. It can also be launched in a double "belly to belly" configuration on top of a large multi-stage booster. This is a fast, agile reconnaissance vehicle with single-stage surface-to-orbit capability. So the engine pods would have some kind of compact tokamak fusion generator for power, that sort of thing."Īs for the Ranger, that can also be clicked on the Board the Endurance webpage, giving this screen: But of course, these produce much, much higher levels of thrust than the ion engines of today. An article here has a quote from the movie's visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin which confirms it's a type of ion engine: "The engines are imagined to be something plasma electric, a super-advanced version of the ion engines already being used in space exploration. But the advantage is that because it would have a much higher exhaust velocity (30,000-120,000 meters per second according to the table here, compared with 4,400 m/s for the best chemical rocket), according to the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation this means it can achieve a given delta-v (change in velocity over an extended period of time) using much less fuel mass.Īs mentioned in this article, in the section "Webster, We Have a Problem", VASIMR would probably require nuclear power to generate the needed electricity for long-term spaceflight, so that may explain the reference to nuclear fusion above (unless they're suggesting the superheated plasma from the tokamak reactor is used more directly to superheat and ionize some exhaust as in the proposed fusion-driven rocket of the kind outlined in some NASA presentations here and here, but when they say the tokamak is used for "generating electricity for use in the engines", it sounds like the engines themselves don't rely on nuclear reactions for anything but electrical power). it accelerates the rocket more weakly) so it can't be used for takeoff from a planet, only for travel when the ship has already achieved escape or orbital velocities. This type of engine creates less thrust than chemical rockets (i.e. Perhaps it would be similar to the proposed VASIMR (Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket), a proposed type of ion engine which would be much more powerful than any of the ones currently used on space probes. So the maneuvering thrusters (which would be used for things like changing orientation, spin, and docking maneuvers) are chemical rockets using hydrazine, the main thrusters (the three circles seen in the diagram) are magnetoplasma rockets, also known as ion engines or ion thrusters because they use magnetic fields to accelerate a plasma of charged ions which serve as propellant. ![]() These are standard hydrazine thrusters of the type use in present day space travel. Each engine module features small manoeuvring thrusters on its corners. As well as generating electricity for use in the engines the tokamaks supply power to the rest of the Endurance's systems. Each module contains a compact tokamak power plant which generates electricity via magnetically-confined fusion. The Endurance's engines feature advanced magnetoplasma rockets, which produce a distinctive blue exhaust plume of ionised gas when firing. If you go to the tie-in page Board the Endurance (which can also be found at the link Valorum gave) and click on the module labeled "main engine module", you get the following image (click to enlarge), showing that four of the modules are actually engine modules which presumably contain fuel:
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