SPACE.com -- Loose Moose: One Way to Bail Out of Orbit

A concept poster for Moose.

To use Moose, an astronaut first would climb inside a big, foam-filled plastic bag.

Here, the astronaut fires a thruster attached to the bag to push it out of orbit.

Eventually a parachute would cushion the astronaut's drop to land or water on Earth.

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	Loose Moose: One Way to Bail Out of Orbit By Mark Kahn Special to SPACE.com posted: 07:00 am ET 23 September 2000

Outline for article on the developmental history of space lifeboats by Mark Kahn (July, 1999)

Aerospace engineers for decades have struggled to come up with a practical way for astronauts to bail out of a stricken spacecraft and safely return to Earth.

With the International Space Station (ISS) ready for occupancy this fall, the idea of a "lifeboat" that could whisk a crew safely home from an emergency in space is a prime concern.

For now, NASA will use the three-seat Russian Soyuz capsule for emergency return trips to Earth. When more crew members come aboard the ISS, though, a bigger lifeboat will be needed. To that end, U.S. engineers are testing the wedge-shaped X-38, which can hold seven crew members.

The European Space Agency, meanwhile, also is at work on its own crew return vehicle for possible use by ISS crews.

But for sheer audacity, few lifeboat schemes can compare with a daring design put forward by General Electric in the early 1960s.

Called MOOSE, for Man Out of Space Easiest, it would have required an astronaut to slip inside a big, foam-filled plastic bag, float out of the spacecraft and fire thrusters attached to the bag to push it out of orbit.

Then, the astronaut would rely on a built-in heat shield to survive the fiery plunge through Earth's atmosphere and wait for a parachute to automatically deploy for a safe landing.

"MOOSE represents a unique design concept for emergency return vehicle of a man from orbit," a 1966 General Electric (GE) promotional booklet said.

"While admittedly a last resort -- and certainly no substitute for design excellence, manufacturing precision, thorough testing, maintenance and training, in other words, long-term reliability -- a workable space-rescue system is insurance against a disaster," the booklet continued.

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GE was one of a number of companies competing for space-related NASA and Defense Department contracts, and its Reentry Systems Department in Philadelphia made a preliminary start on the MOOSE project in the early 1960s.

Essentially, MOOSE was to be an astronauts personal reentry vehicle and the astronaut would need to be fully alert and conscious to follow the step-by-step procedures required for it.

But even its most ardent supporters saw it as extremely risky.

"You wouldn't want to try something like this unless there was no way at all of landing in the disabled spaceship and the astronaut just had to bail out in space," MOOSE project chief John Quillinan told a Philadelphia newspaper, The Evening Bulletin, at the time.

An artist's conception of an astronaut free falling to Earth in the MOOSE space lifeboat.

Corporate brochures touting MOOSE did not focus on the question of whether a person could withstand the mental and physiological shock of an untethered jump into space and a free fall of hundreds of miles (kilometers) back to Earth.

Perhaps the engineers gained confidence from U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger who made a couple of towering leaps from open-balloon gondolas during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In one high-altitude test in August 1960, Kittinger jumped from a height of nearly 103,000 feet (31,395 meters) and free fell for more than four and a half minutes before his parachute opened. Kittinger even surpassed the speed of sound the only human to do so without using an aircraft or space vehicle -- yet survived his 20-mile (32-kilometer) fall in remarkably good shape.

The reasoning followed that if one man survived such a drop, then others could as well from even higher altitudes.

So GE went ahead and tested parts of MOOSE, including a sample of the heat shield which was flown aboard a Mercury spacecraft. As the project matured, so did the acronym. MOOSE became shorthand for Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment.

The company also tested inflating the foam-filled bag with a human inside. That test, in 1968, went "amazingly well," GE engineer Harold Bloom told Philadelphia's Sunday Bulletin Magazine.

Finally, GE tested MOOSE with a dummy inside, tossing it over an abandoned bridge near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, to splash in the river below.

Yet MOOSE never entered production. Neither NASA nor the Pentagon expressed enough interest in the concept to keep it going and the program was quietly killed.

The ultimate space lifeboat, of course, may have been "Aquarius," the lunar module for the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission in 1970. Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert used it to help get them home after an explosion in their service module crippled some of the functions of the Apollo command module en route to the moon -- though they had to use the command module with its heat shield to return to Earth.

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