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MOOSE: Man Out Of Space Easiest or Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment
MOOSE: Does it mean Man Out Of Space Easiest or Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment. Both, actually.
Behold the MOOSE (man out of space easiest) emergency escape system proposed by GE
— Chris Combs (@DrChrisCombs) May 11, 2022
The 60s were a helluva time
HT to @Wrenbird___ for the share pic.twitter.com/4yaEnmpNML
Details, thanks to Wikipedia:
The design was proposed by General Electric in the early 1960s. The system was quite compact, weighing 200 lb (91 kg) and fitting inside a suitcase-sized container. It consisted of a small twin-nozzle rocket motor sufficient to deorbit the astronaut, a PET film bag 6 ft (1.8 m) long with a flexible 0.25 in (6.4 mm) ablative heat shield on the back, two pressurized canisters to fill it with polyurethane foam, a parachute, radio equipment and a survival kit.[4]The astronaut would leave the vehicle in a space suit, climb inside the plastic bag, and then fill it with foam.[5] The bag had the shape of a blunt cone, with the astronaut embedded in its base facing the apex of the cone. The rocket pack would protrude from the bag and be used to slow the astronaut's orbital speed enough so that he would reenter Earth's atmosphere, and the foam-filled bag would act as insulation during the subsequent aerobraking. Finally, once the astronaut had descended to 30,000 ft (9.1 km) where the air was sufficiently dense, the parachute would automatically deploy and slow the astronaut's fall to 17 mph (7.6 m/s).
Science fiction readers have been entertained down through the years by similar ideas. Consider EE 'Doc' Smith, who described for them a very early example of ablative heat shielding in his 1934 opus Triplanetary:
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.
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