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NASA's Astronaut Rescue Ball
Thanks to @AeroDork for reminding us about NASA's cool astronaut rescue ball:
NASA designed an astronaut rescue ball for situations where a shuttle failure required a crew to abandon a ship w/o enough spacesuits. pic.twitter.com/DmTyQlOcSK
— Aerodork (@AeroDork) May 21, 2017
(NASA's Astronaut Rescue Ball)
Fans of golden age sf great EE 'Doc' Smith recall the special "re-entry ball" with an ablative heat shield used in his 1934 novel Triplanetary; the device was used to jump from a supersonic plane traveling at 2,000 miles per hour at the very edge of the atmosphere:
Back toward the trailing edges then, to a small escape-hatch beside which was fastened a dull black ball... He gasped as the air rushed out into near-vacuum... He rolled the ball out onto the hatch, where he opened it: two hinged hemispheres, each heavily padded with molded composition resembling sponge rubber......He curled up into one half of the ball; the other half closed over him and locked. The hatch opened. Ball and closely-prisoned man plummeted downward..
And as the ball bulleted downward on a screaming slant, it shrank!
...a synthetic which air-friction would erode away, molecule by molecule, so rapidly that no perceptible fragment of it would reach ground.
Read more about the re-entry ball with ablative heat shield, including other references.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 4/30/2017)
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