From the Vault: To The Escape Pod!

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's vault time.
We're going to climb into the vault, but actually it
appears to the vault is ceiling behind us and taking
off into space. Yes, because this is the escape Pod, Joe. Uh,
this episode from November is to the escape Pod. I

(00:26):
think we recorded this a week that you and I
were both kind of feeling like stopped the planet of
the Apes. I want to get off. Yeah. And plus
this one published on on on Thanksgiving, which I think
a lot of times, you know, it's holiday holiday travels,
the pressures of the American holidays. Uh, the call of
the escape Pod is often, um, you know, siren like

(00:47):
and its power. But we also got to talk about
escape from New York and this one. So anytime you
get to anytime we get to talk about Escape from
New York, it's a good time. Yeah. The Donald pleasant
S egg I'm sure comes up. Well. I hope you
enjoy this classic episode about escape pods. Welcome to Stuff

(01:07):
to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com.
I'll follow, Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick and Robert.
A lot of times on this podcast we end up
talking about instincts. Yes, we use our instincts to talk
about instincts, often worse. But one of any animal's deepest

(01:32):
instincts is the escape instinct. It's right down there with
the desire for food, water reproduction, but I would say
maybe even more immediate. And you can definitely see how
powerful it is by the way that escape instincts, even
in rational, really high functioning primates like human beings, can
totally short circuit rational thinking and lead to mass panics

(01:55):
that kill people. This happens all the time. Uh. And
so the escape rive, you know, the fight or flight impulse,
has been associated in neuroscience with the amygdala and the
autonomic nervous system, deep deep, primitive old parts of the brain,
the rat like hind brain, the reptile brain. Right, though
I have heard people disputing the term reptile brain, I

(02:19):
do not refer to it as such, and from a
scientific standpoint, right, But but the idea of the the earlier,
more primitive parts of the brain that go way back
in evolutionary history, that is there and so escape is
is rooted down in those really primitive parts of the brain.
Is this fundamental, intractable part of human psychology, because think

(02:39):
about it. When you go into a room, even if
there's no cause of danger whatsoever, just say it's an
office Christmas party or something like that. Oh yeah, you
better believe I'm gonna have an escape planet an office.
Exactly what's the first thing you do in your mind?
If you're like me, it's probably unconscious. You're not consciously
thinking about it, but you do just sort of take
note of where all the eggs it's are ye in

(03:01):
the room? Do you do the same thing, Robert? Yeah, well,
I would say, like the physical exits, it's almost like
a subconscious thing. But I also will kind of have
like social exit strategies in mind as well, right right,
If this gets uncomfortable for any number of reasons, and
I'm not saying like office Christmas parties in particular are uncomfortable,

(03:23):
but like any social situation that I'm not like one
comfortable with, I'll have that escape hatch in the back
of my mind. You know, that's a really good point
because that kind of shows how our obsession with physical
escape extends even to our metaphors and our abstract thinking.
You know, you're in an awkward social situation, how do
I get out? You're in a bad relationship, and you think,

(03:44):
how do I find a way out of this? You're
not physically finding a way out, but that that's the
way your brain goes. It's like the hatch in the
top of an elevator or the roof of a school bus.
You're probably not gonna shinny up any any elevator shaft
cable today, but there's something comfortable about knowing that hatches there.
Though I have always kind of wanted to do that. Yeah,

(04:08):
but but it's true. I think, always somewhere deep in
your mind, there is a part of you, mostly unconscious,
that is obsessed with escape, and it's always doing the
pre calculations for an escape trajectory. How would I get
out of here? How how could I get out if
I had to? So, of course our obsession with escape
escape routes, flight from danger. It extends to our technology.

(04:30):
Our technology always reflects our psychology. So when we imagine
a rebel spaceship fleeing from the galactic empire, we also
imagine escape pods fleeing from the larger rebel ship. And
uh no, of course, no science fiction vessel is complete
without an escape pod. And I think at some point
this year, I bet, when times were rough and the

(04:52):
world seemed full of despair, you thought about an escape pod,
didn't you. Sometime this year many of us have found
ourselves idly wishing you could just get into the capsule
and blast away and leave everything behind. The one I
always come back to in in fiction is the escape
pod that that that president ideal President Donald Pleasants uses

(05:15):
um to escape from Air Force one in Escape from
New York. It's also my favorite, yeah, because it's it's
so comfy. It's an egg, yeah, and and Pleasants is
kind of egg like himself, so and it it's just
his perfect egg that he's able to get into an
escape from immediate danger into of course more immediate danger. Right. So,
if you haven't seen the movie President US, President Donald Pleasants,

(05:37):
which is kind of strange because he has a British accent,
he gets his plane, gets captured by terrorists who are
going to kill him and they're gonna crash the plane
into Manhattan. I believe it was kind of strange. But yeah,
so Donald pleasants gets into this big egg and he
gets shot out the back of his airplane to safety.
I think he says something to his doomed staff like main,
god watch over you all. But yeah, that's a great one.

(06:02):
But there are tons of great fictional escape pods there
in all kinds of James Bond movies. Always when Raker
had a great one that was kind of like a
like a sexy um bachelor pad, they're always like that.
There's some aquatics escape pods in James Bond movies too.
Why do the escape pods in these movies always have
like satin sheets and champagne coolers and curtains on the windows.

(06:26):
It's weird because they're kind of it's kind of there's
a sense of it being a a comfy little abode
and like a little bed, but also kind of like
a little casket. You know, it gets complicated, I guess
when you start teasing apart how we design our our
escape pods and how we design our our our coffins.
You're totally right. It is like a coffin. It's like

(06:48):
a sexy, sexy coffin. But of course, so we don't
have to look entirely to fiction for examples of escape pods,
because sometimes we really do build escape capsules of some
kind into our technologies, especially our vehicles. Um, but why
would you build escape capsules into real vehicles? Why not

(07:08):
just have a door? Well, that's kind of an obvious question.
It's a great question. Um. I think one of the
main area to look for an answer here is in
the room of aviation and a lot of We're gonna
go through several examples that are related to aviation or
or space exploration because we've all seen like the or
I don't know about we've all, but I've certainly seen

(07:29):
my fair share, and I know you've seen your fair
share of like old serial adventures from the thirties and forties,
where you have individuals trying to get off of a
crashing airplane and they're using an obvious set with just
in abnormally large fuselage, and they're walking with relative ease
down the aisle of this airplane to go jump out

(07:49):
of a door out of the the the portal with
their parachute. And of course, a crashing airplane or an
out of controlled airplane or airplane in peril is not
going to be that straightforward a situation generally, right, well,
I mean a passenger aircraft also are just not made
to be jumped out of. You can read the whole
dB Cooper story for yeah, for some more details on this.

(08:13):
So there's a basic need for an escape system be at,
and be at an ejection seat, which we're not really
going to get into ejection seats much here that we
should mention we're all familiar with ejector seats, right, Like
in top Gun, the ejector seat will propel you up
the pilot out of the failing aircraft. You deploy a parachute,
you get the pilot safely to the ground. But generally
the canopy comes off, though some there are models of

(08:35):
ejection seats where the canopy did not come off and
you just blast through the glass. But today we're talking
about escape pods. So when you need this enclosed space,
when does that come in? Well, it's gonna come when
you need added protection, certainly when you're dealing with higher altitude,
higher speed aircraft. And and of course this is just
on top of we we talked about, you know the
need for the individual, for the pilot, for the crew

(08:56):
member to have an escape plan. But of course, just
to boil down, like the basic economic idea here is
that human lives are more valuable than machines. Yeah, but
not in like a moral sense, because most of these
are war machines designed to like drop nuclear payloads on
the whole cities. Know what means they cost more to train,
right right? You need you need highly trained specialist individuals

(09:19):
who are piloting these aircraft. And even though the aircraft
costs millions and millions of dollars if it goes down
in flames, at least you can say in since you're
saving the brain of the aircraft, you're saving the pilots
that fluid exactly. So let's look at some examples from
aviation history of these great Uh, what would you call
it if? If the pilot being saved from a failing

(09:41):
aircraft is like saving the brain, the escape pod is
like the jar that you put the brain in. Yeah,
So let's look at some of these jars. All right, Well,
so the first one we're gonna bring up, and we're
gonna I'm gonna try and make sure that we have
images related to these on the landing page for this
episode of Stuff to Blow your mind, Dot com because
you're gonna we're gonna try and to describe everything, but
you know you're gonna you're gonna probably want some visuals.

(10:03):
So the first one we want to mention here is
the B fifty eight Hustler, the convey B fifty eight Hustler.
So this was a bomber that saw service nineteen sixty
through nineteen seventy. About hundred and sixteen were built. It
was a three man crew. This was a U s
Air Force US Air Force debuted nineteen fifty six, and
it was the US Air force Is first operational supersonic bomber.

(10:27):
It was visually notable because it had these awesome delta wings,
so it looked like an arrow um and it also
had a wasp waist fuselage. It was so thin that
it had to use external bomb pods. Gleaming chrome appearance
in most of the images you see of it, so yeah,
it looked like an arrowhead, though maybe an arrowhead either
pregnant with death or infected with explosive parasites. However you

(10:51):
want to frame it. It is a very weird and
very sexy looking aircraft. It's got this this tapered fuselage
like you're talking about is kind of thin, and the
in these straight, completely angular wings cutting through it, it's
cool to look at. Yeah, and I wanna I mention
this real quick quickly here if it sounds like if
some people might be thinking, oh, you're awfuly enthusiastic about

(11:13):
all these awful war machines, Robert, uh, I do have
to say that I grew up in a household where
my my dad was a big aviation enthusiast, and uh
I was really into aviation history, military aviation history. So
I grew up like with a lot of books about
these airplanes around, and it seems like there were always
documentaries on TV about these aircraft. So I have a

(11:33):
certain fondness for their designs. But back to the so yeah,
sexually looking aircraft. Uh. It initially boasted typical ejection seats,
so just blast the individual crew members out of the
imperiled aircraft. But ejection at supersonic speeds proved dangerous. So
Stanley Aircraft Corporation developed a retrofitted ejection capsule and in

(11:55):
late nineteen six two and this allowed aircrew to eject
safely it twice the speed of sound and from as
high as altitudes of seventy feet or roughly twenty one kilometers.
That does not sound like a condition in which you
would want to be ejected naked out of your right,
have your brain ejective naked or even in a flight
suit and in a chair. Right, So they came up

(12:19):
with this capsule. The capsule was essentially a clamshell hood
that closed over the ejection seat and it was I
found some some Gatty images on this, and the Getty
images a database, so some some work that went and
went into designing this, and it was apparently referred to
as the torture chamber during development because it I guess,
because it kind of looks like an Iron Maiden. It

(12:41):
really does. Yeah, So this capsule, you have the seat,
it's like a right angle kind of thing, which is
where the crew member would be I guess, but folded
over the top of it, it looks kind of like
a It's just this cascading series of metal bands coming down,
So it looks like a mask that a cinebyte would
where in one of the Hell raisor sequels, and the

(13:02):
cinembyte would be called like shutter face or something. Yeah,
it's reminiscent a little bit too of of a rolltop desk.
Yeah yeah, yeah, like that, but metal. Yeah, so this
this that once it's over you, this thing was air tight,
had an independent oxygen supply supply system that ensured pressurization.
And this was but one of the things that was

(13:23):
it was far from fully automated, because I know, when
you're when you're hearing this, you're reading about it, you're
imagining like, oh, it shuts over you and then you
blast out like you're in a science fiction movie. But
it wasn't. The user still had a number of choices
after the clamshell shut. You could continue on to ejection,
or you could hold off until the plane made it
to a lower altitude that didn't demand the pressurization. UM.

(13:46):
The idea here being, you know that is still incredibly dangerous,
UM ejecting from the aircraft at high altitudes, even in
the capsule. So if the plane is not in just
complete peril, then maybe it makes sense to wait just
a minute, right um. And this is the thing we
should keep in mind throughout the episode. I mean, ejecting
from an aircraft, uh always comes with risks. You know,

(14:09):
when you eject from an aircraft to bail out, there
is a certain percent chance that you will be killed
by the ejection process. That's why it is a last resort,
is a violent last resort in a in a in
a terrible dangerous situation. Now, additionally, the pilot's capsule in
the Hustler contained the control stick and other necessary controls

(14:29):
to pilot the aircraft to that lower altitude, and then
communication was maintained capsule to capsule in the airplane. Uh
So it's this interesting, Um, I love how these capsules
are not immediate um, immediately exercised from the craft. They're
kind of a part of the craft in peril. So

(14:51):
what kind of test pilot would volunteer to be the
first test subject of the torture chamber. Well, it's interesting
and reading about these different tests because the thing you
had have you have a fair amount of testing. They
went into any of these extensive testing even uh, you
would have test pilots that are you know, trying them
out in some cases on the ground. Um, they're loading

(15:13):
them onto uh, you know, under propelled carts to just
see how they how the impact affects them. And in
the case of the hustlers ejection capsules, the U S
Air Force used Himalayan and American black bears to test
the ejection seats. Well, how did I hear you? Right? Yes,
say that again, Himalayan and American black bears. Uh, none

(15:34):
of them were killed during the tests. They only suffered
broken bones for what it's worth, and they were drugged.
But we're talking ejections at speeds of mock one point six,
um that's we know, or and also at altitudes of
forty five thousand feet. So yeah, the bears helped us
out in that regard. It's well hard to argue that

(15:57):
they volunteered, but I'm glad to hear that no bears
were killed in the making of this escape pod. Yeah,
at least we can say that, right. Um So after injection,
the capsule here featured a parachute, of course, as well
as shock absorbers and inflatable bladders to turn the thing
into a life raft if it fell in the water.
Uh So, in short, it was it was a pretty
pretty cool escape capsule. I think. I think it's one

(16:18):
of the better like just pure examples of of a
of an escape capsule in aviation history. There are actually
videos online of the tests of this escape capsule, of
it coming up out of the plane. You can see
it just rocketing up into the sky and shooting up
over the top of the plane as the plane passes underneath.
It's worth looking up. Yeah, there's also a fabulous periscope

(16:41):
films documentary that's freely available on YouTube now that that
shows you exactly how it worked, and it had had
like some wonderful animations. They quoted Shakespeare and showed like
sort of a Disney documentary, hand paid but leafing through
a book of the works of Shakespeare just impeccably. You know,
nineteen five these pr project here, So do we know

(17:03):
how often people in the real world ejected from one
of these planes? And how well it worked? This was
a real revelation to me. There is a wonderful website,
and I say wonderful. It's it's a little long in
the tooth now it could it could benefit from redesign,
but this but the work that's gone into it is
pretty pretty awesome. It's ejection history dot org dot UK

(17:26):
and it's an attempt by the author and contributors to
catalog every ejection from from key aircraft and and and
and also rank like how how survivable each incident was,
So all in all, like some some aircraft have better

(17:46):
databases and others on this site, but it's it's a
real sobering look at the effectiveness of ejection seats and
ejection capsules, uh to determine, like to what center they
able to save live in the event of you know, catastrophe.
In the case of the Hustler, it looked like there's
something like thirty ejections total, with the majority of them

(18:09):
being survivals. So the torture chamber by and large worked,
it would seem too. I don't I don't have a
have a particular stat on it because the database doesn't
really present the information that that. Clearly it's not it's
not a modern spreadsheets sort of format. But certainly if
you really have to have an answer to that, you
can go and and count them. Um. But yeah, the

(18:31):
Hustler an interesting plane, a great escape capsule. Get in
that cinebyte head. Okay, let's look at another one. How
about the XP seventy Valkyrie. Oh yeah, so this this
one's really cool too. So this was a prototype for
the B seventy. And this was another beautiful delta wing
bomber of the sixties, designed to be a high altitude
mock three bomber. It never actually entered service, so visually

(18:54):
it's most striking feature and the one that that if
you've looked at aviation pictures in the past, you might go, oh,
that air plant, it's uh, it's probably because it has
these two large canards which acted control surfaces. Essentially imagine
the so imagine the airplane is a bird. It has
two little wings right behind its ears. Um, those are

(19:14):
just you know, control surfaces essentially located behind the cockpit.
Performance Wise, however, the really crazy thing about the XP
seventy was that it was designed to fold its wings
down hearing supersonic flight and ride its own shock wave
quote much as a surfer rides in ocean wave. That's
a according to the NASA dot gov fact sheet on

(19:36):
this aircraft. Wow. So if you look at pictures of
this aircraft, it also is very visually striking. As you say,
I thought this one looks kind of like a paper plane.
It does. Like it's very white and very thin, extremely
thin as far as the wings go, has a paper
like kind of quality to it, except that the the
of course, the middle fuselage is kind of circular, but

(19:57):
otherwise it's it's dead ringer for paper plane. Yeah, it
looks it looks like a paper plane or a piece
of oregony, almost like an oregony crane. Yeah, I see
that too. So this airplane design came about in a
time of uncertain future for traditional bombers, and the Kennedy
administration ended up scrapping it, so it became a research aircraft,

(20:18):
largely for supersonic transport research looking into the idea of
using supersonic airline or supersonic sonic transport planes. In general,
it was the right shape, it was the right size,
and even though the program was scrapped, they had two prototypes,
so you had two XP seventy Valkyries, So it was

(20:38):
sort of a prototype concorde. Well it was like that.
Well it was totally a bomber, but but it was
the right size and it had enough in common with
the designs that were being looked at for commercial use
that it could be used to explore the possibilities there. So,
despite some of the problems, the early flights provided data

(20:59):
on a number of issues acing supersonic transport. These included
aircraft noise, operational problems, control system design, uh comparison of
winternal predictions with what actually happens during the course of flight,
high ALTITA to clear air turbulence, all of these issues.
I mean, this was there was still so much to
learn at the time about supersonic flight. But this one

(21:22):
did have an ejection capsule. Yes, back to the main point.
The reason we're talking about is that it did feature
an injection capsule and it had a clam clam shell
design similar to that that we discussed in the Hustler.
So they're bringing back shutter face, right, Yeah, shutter faces
in action that the ideally the chair that you're in
the cockpit seat, it kind of like folds back and

(21:44):
then the clam shell snaps over. Uh, and it contains
survival gear oxygen systems. It also contained the flight control
stick for the pilot and um, you know, it's very
much the same idea. We We only had two of these,
so it's there's not a lot of ejection data on it.

(22:04):
But there is one key incident that occurred with one
of the XP seventies, and that was a tragedy involving
one of them in nineteen sixty six. June eighth, nineteen
sixty six, the second of the two XP seventies crashed
following a mid air collision with the NASA's F one
oh four in Chase plane. How did that happen? Um,

(22:27):
They were essentially they were they were doing photographs of
the research that was being conducted and one plane got
too close to the other. And Yeah, it was pretty
pretty terrible accident because in the course of this, Joe Walker,
the F one oh four in pilot, he died in
the accident. Um Carl Cross, who was making his first

(22:48):
flight in the XP seventy, was unable to eject and
he died in the crash. North American test pilot Al White,
who had been with the XP seventy project since the beginning,
he act. He say he ejected in the capsule, but
he received serious injuries in the process because the clam
shell crushed his arm. So his arm was outside of

(23:11):
the clam shell and it was crushed. That is something
I've read about and these, uh, these aviation eject capsules,
is that they tend to if they close over you,
they have to close with extreme force. Uh, And so
you're always at risk of having injury from the actual
closing process of the capsule. Yeah, and certainly, you know,

(23:32):
going through that A that A that ejection website that
I mentioned earlier. You see this with with countless ejections.
Capsules are not where Sometimes individuals survive, sometimes they don't.
Sometimes they are minor, sometimes they are severe injuries that
are entailed in the course of escaping that aircraft. Okay,
let's look at another one. How about the General Dynamics

(23:53):
F one eleven ard Vark name, yes, the ard Vark,
this one. This one is a great, great aircraft. This
was one was one of always one of my favorites.
So this one was in service seven through for the
US Air Force. Of course, five hundred and sixty three
were produced, and uh it was. It was always a
favorite airplane of mind growing up because in probably in

(24:15):
part because I did have a toy version of it.
There you go, if you have that physical manifestation of
the thing as a kid, you can't help it be
a little more into it. But it was also just
like a little bit like a like it was just
a weird plane. It stood out from the other jets.
It effectively came off like a larger bomber version of
the F four Team Tomcat. The of course, you know
the top gun plane for anyone out there is not

(24:37):
not that familiar with with your jets, variable sweep wings
and coolest of all, kandem seating for the two man crew. Okay,
so if you have if you have top gun in mind,
of course you're going to imagine front and back seating
for the pilot and what the gunner? What are the
two people? I don't know my top gun, but yeah,
you'll have one in front and one directly behind. Yeah,

(24:58):
with multiple crews, you know you're off and talking about
the pilot, UM a navigator, pilot, co pilot, bombity or
you know, there are all these different roles depending on
what the airplane is, and in your your sleeker faster
designs such as fighter planes and interceptors and fighter bombers,
in some cases you're gonna have you know, one in front,
one behind. UM. Also with trainers. Trainer aircraft are often

(25:22):
like that. But this one had pilot co pilot pilot
setting right next to each other, just like a love seat,
just like a love seat. And uh, the cool part
here was the crew didn't have ejection seats or an
escape pod. Even the entire cabin of the F one
eleven ard Vark was an escape capsule, the McDonald escaped capsule,

(25:42):
and it looks something like a star treks uh shuttlecraft. Wow.
So we will see this idea repeated in a few minutes.
So when talking about some proposals for passenger aircraft, it
was so, yeah, think of think of a shuttlecraft. It
was self righting, it was water tight, it could be
used as a flow tation device. Um. So sorry you

(26:02):
said self righting. Not that's not riding with a d
but self righting, as in it would bob right side up. Yeah.
So it's a pretty cool little capsule. I mean, it
was the it was it was the entire crew cabin
really and so so how did it work? Well, if
we look to ejection history dot org dot UK, which
is the leading source of information on this sort of thing, um,

(26:23):
looks like there were about over a hundred injections logged
for the F one eleven during the course of its tenure,
and the survival rate looks pretty good. But again, it's
it's kind of sobering to look at a lot of
this data, especially when you can see the pictures of
the pilots that were involved. Sometimes the survivors sometimes um
casualties because you can you can have this great ejection

(26:45):
system in place, But you're still talking again about really
dangerous situations, uh, really parallel situations with a malfunctioning or
crashing aircraft. Sometimes it's in a war zone, and we're
talking about everything from bird strike that's when an airplane
strikes a bird, which can have just cataclysmic uh results
on the aircraft. You wouldn't think so, but yeah, I

(27:07):
mean the high speed bird a high speed plane, uh
versus and that meets a you know, the canopy of
the plane or the engine, So you have a bird strike, crashes, collisions,
engine problems. All these things happen in the course of
a plane's tenure of it, you know, is actually utilized
over the course of a decade or longer um. And
sometimes the sometimes the stories are just like fatally short,

(27:31):
you know, it's just like the plane had a malfunction
and it crashed and there's no sign that even an
ejection was even attempted. It just happened so fast that
other times they're pretty remarkable. There's a listing for a
in an October seven, nineteen seventy six ejection with the
ard Vark uh and it says quote capsule was fired
with the airplane about sixty degrees nose down at a

(27:52):
hundred feet or less. Uh So, like the it seems
like if this is in the last second, this may
even be past the last second. Yeah, and they but
they actually both crew members survived. There were no senti
for serious injuries. So this one was one that sort
of stood out as an anomaly of like a it
really seemed like it was going to go the other way,
but they survived thanks to the escape capsule. Okay, how

(28:15):
about one more? What about the Rockwell B one A Lancer. Yeah,
this one is this is another beautiful plane. I guess
kind of there's kind of an evolution here, and this
is the form that we still find in service today.
Uh and uh it's it's likely going to remain in
service tool around twenty I think of the current estimates. Here.
The U. S. Air Force uh B one Lancer, So

(28:39):
the Air Force had four B one a's built. This
was the first model and uh then they ended up
doing a hundred B one bs. The first three B
one as featured an escape capsule that ejected the cockpit
with all four crew members inside it, much like we
saw with the Ard vark, so just you know that
the next evolution of the art, VARK was present here.

(28:59):
But then B one A was equipped with a conventional
ejectian seat for for each crew member, so they ended
up scrapping the the full escape capsule design in favor
of more traditional ejection seats. So that was kind of
like the end of the the golden age of the
ejection capsule, I guess you would say, at least from

(29:20):
a military aviation standpoint. And apparently it was only used once.
I mean, you only had what three aircraft that featured it,
But there was an August incident escape pod parachutes didn't
deploy fully in the module impacted in a right nose
a low altitude. One crew member was killed, two others

(29:40):
were severely injured. So the one use of it, again
during its limited rollout, uh was was very much a
mixed back. So one of the big takeaways from all
these stories in military aviation history is yet again we
said this earlier, but even if you make it into
the escape pod, it's not a sure thing. It's still
a dangerous world out there between you and the ground.

(30:03):
I guess most of the dangers at the ground. But yeah,
but but yeah, it's a dangerous environment. You're not really
supposed to be up there, and the thing that got
you there is malfunctioning or crashing. So Joe, I flew
a few times this year. Uh where was my injection seat?
It's a total bummer, isn't it that you do not
get an escape pod in a regular passenger aircraft? I

(30:25):
want my money back. No, actually I don't, because I
arrived safely and so you know, it's fine. Uh So,
there are a few patents that there. There is a
reason that I'm going to get to in a minute
why you don't usually see this in passenger aircraft. But
first I just want to look at a couple of examples.
One is a patent that I found filed January two

(30:46):
eleven by Tatiana ivan Ivna dimon Chuk, who wrote this
patent for quote method for the mass emergency evacuation of
passengers from air transport and aeroplane with equipment for rescuing
passengers in an emergency situation. I have to just comment
reading a bunch of patents for this episode. Man, the

(31:08):
writing style of most patents is so awful. It as
if they're written explicitly to make it hard to picture
what they're talking about. Yeah, thank goodness there there are
often visuals to go with it, because otherwise it would
be very difficult to get the idea from some of
the writeups. Yeah, I don't mean to call this one
out in particular, but it also the writing wasn't amazing

(31:29):
on it. But yeah, that that's sort of across the board.
But anyway, basically what is envisioned in this one is
that the airplane would have rows of seats that are
enclosable into smaller capsules, and then these capsules would sit
on some kind of guide track inside the airplane fuselage,
and when an emergency occurs, the hatches and the fuselage

(31:51):
pop open and these seat containing capsules would be ejected.
According to one diagram I saw, it looks like they
would sort of blast out to the bottom of the
plane and an angle diagonal to the plane's movement. But yeah,
I have not seen anyone claiming that they're going to
make a passenger plane incorporating these designs. Yeah, this particular

(32:12):
design it it basically think of there being a tiny
train inside the airplane, like little train cars, little subway
cars that have your your seats in them right, and
then if if, if, if necessary, if the situation gets dire,
each of those train cars may be pooped out of
the airplane. Oh it's a good one, okay, So I

(32:34):
found another one also that there were some reports about
another supposed design for a passenger plane escape system, this
one by a Ukrainian engineer named Vladimir Nikolayevitch Tatarenko, and
there are some YouTube videos demonstrating the concept, complete with
inspiring quotes by Confucius and Einstein and uh so. The

(32:54):
demonstration in the videos shows that under this design, what
would happen is that the lower part of the fuselage
detaches from the engine and pilot section of the plane,
including the entire passenger cabin and luggage storage. So if
you imagine, it's like you get into the cabin of
the plane, and that is a detachable section of the

(33:17):
plane that attaches to the wings and the pilot's area
through through a connector, and so an emergency happens, the
cabin of the plane essentially just detaches from the fuselage
and comes off. Parachutes extend from containers on the top
of the escape capsule, and the cabin comes down for
a soft landing on inflatable cushions. I have to say,

(33:40):
I'm I'm a little iffy about this one because I've
mostly seen it covered on like viral news type sites.
You know about these inventions, Robert. Sometimes you see inventions
that are covered in trade press for whatever field the
inventions in, and they're covered in mainstream news, and then
there are the other ones that get picked up on
like ain't that cool dot com? Or something. This one's

(34:00):
more of the latter type, and uh, and so I
haven't seen it in serious sources covering aviation technology. What
little coverage it has gotten in mainstream press appears to
be pretty skeptical of the practicality of the model. So
I wouldn't expect to be seeing this implemented in any
real airplanes. But there's a larger problem here, which is

(34:23):
that even if you could make escape pods on passenger
aircraft work, which with enough motivation and investment, I'm sure
you probably could, I don't think that any of these
are ever going to become a real thing. One of
the first problems is that when you picture the capsules
coming off, coming out of the plane and then deploying
parachutes to parachute down to safety. That might help sometimes,

(34:47):
but the vast majority of airplane accidents happened during takeoff, ascent,
decent and landing, when you are nearer to the ground,
and parachute supported capsules are just going to be less
likely to me to happy end, we mentioned earlier problems
about like trying to deploy a parachute when you're very
close to the ground, it doesn't usually work. Right, And

(35:07):
think back to all these the capsules we discussed so far.
In military aviation, these are rejection capsules. These are essentially
fancy ejection seats, in versions of the ejection seat, which
of course launches the individual away from the plane generally
upward um. And that I mean like, for instance, that
F one eleven example we saw where there is exceedingly

(35:28):
low altitude, but the reason they survived is probably because
it launched the capsule up far enough for the parachute
to come into play for them. Right. Uh So, I
found a twenty sixteen Boeing statistical summary compiling all the
fatal commercial aircraft accidents in in the world since while
it was between two thousand and six and and this

(35:49):
only includes things that you would actually consider accidents, not
things like terrorists, bombs or missile strikes. But during this period,
only twelve percent of their fatal accident and two percent
of onboard fatalities occurred during the cruise portion of the flight,
which is what this is when the plane is that
it's regular flying altitude. Most of the time you're in

(36:10):
the air, is the cruise section. Yeah, this isn't the
part where you can get up, walk around, go to
the bathroom, and become increasingly annoyed at the other people
on the plane. Right, so this is going to be
the majority of your flight time, but the minority of
where accidents occur, the vast minority, About eighteen percent of
fatal accidents and fourteen percent of onboard fatalities occurred during

(36:31):
takeoff and climb, and about fifty nine percent of fatal
accidents and sixty one percent of onboard fatalities happened during
descent and landing. And so one thing you know is
from these stats is that if you do happen to
be in the rare midflight accident, it is more likely
to be a fatal one. That's kind of intuitive, right
since it's twelve percent of the accidents, but a kind

(36:52):
of percent of the fatalities, but they just happen a
lot less often. Most of the bad stuff happens near
or on the ground, sometimes that you haven't even left
the ground. You're on the runway when something bad happens. Uh,
And the closer y ared of the ground, the more
useless a proposition like these escape pods becomes. Overall, flying

(37:12):
in airplanes is incredibly safe. I know you've probably heard
stats about this before, how it's more dangerous to be
in a car than an aircraft by pretty much every
measure you can look at. I think this is true.
So there are different ways to estimate the difference. But
here's one thing I found that puts it in terms
of lifetime risks. So the US National Safety Council used

(37:33):
its yearly injury statistics. They do this every year to
compile and odds of dying chart, which is a good idea, right.
It ranks your lifetime chances of being killed by particular things.
So in they claim that your odds of dying in
a plane crash are one in ninety six thousand, five
hundred and sixty six. And according to their data, you

(37:54):
are much more likely to be killed by electricution that's
one in twelve thousand, two hundred, by a b wasp
or hornet sting that's one in fifty five thousand or so,
or in a motor vehicle crash, which is about one
in a hundred and twelve. And I might add that
in two thousand and eight, the same organization rated your
lifetime chances of dying in a space or air travel

(38:16):
accident at one in seven thousand, one seventy eight. So
things seem to be vastly improving. So your odds of
dying in an air travel accident are already exceedingly low.
And if you are in a fatal plane accident, it's
most likely to happen on the runway or at low altitude,
where an escape pod attached to parachutes is much less

(38:37):
likely to help you. UH. The parachutes just probably wouldn't
have time to unfold and decelerate you before you crash
into the ground or catch on fire. But of course,
another thing to consider is economics. We mentioned at the
beginning the economics of the military considerations. UH. Adding escape
pods to passenger planes means building new planes and making
them much heavier and bulkier, which decreases passenger pay load

(39:00):
capacity increases fuel costs. If you want an airplane with
an escape pod, I think you're going to need to
be prepared to pay the nine thousand dollars per ticket
or whatever it ends up costing. One more thing I
wanted to consider. I found an article in a publication
called Defense One, which is from Atlantic Media, called why
your plane can't have an escape pod? And this offered

(39:23):
one thing I hadn't thought of that The author of
this spoke to somebody named David Aiken who's director of
Space Systems, the Space System's Laboratory at the University of Maryland,
and Aikin said, quote, you have to be careful you
don't cause an accident because of an inadvertent actuation of
the safety system. It's an accident that wouldn't happen without

(39:44):
the safety system. That didn't even cross my mind. But
of course that's the case, right. You could have lots
because every time you activate an ejector system, you are
increasing your likelihood of death in an ejection incident. And uh,
and the chance of you dying in a passenger plane
is already so low. It just does not seem like
a good cost benefit trade off. Yeah. I mean, an

(40:07):
ejection seat or an ejection capsule is an incredibly dangerous
device to have. Um. I believe if you go to
a you go to an air show and somebody say
flies in a MiG or or some sort of you know,
older Now, a non military craft, if it had an
ejection seat in its previous life, it probably does not

(40:28):
have one today because it's just not the kind of
thing that a non military craft should have. One last
thing about passenger planes. All those movies that show Air
Force one with an escape pod, the best of course
being as we mentioned earlier, Escape from New York. Donald
Pleasants gets in the egg and it's it's wonderful. Are
there others? Air Force one has an escape pod? Here's one?

(40:50):
How about the movie Air Force One? I never saw it?
Is this? Where is this Harrison Ford versus uh, Gary
Oldman and Gariel Or is it Gary? Okay? I can't remember.
I want to say it's Gary Oldman has president? Harrison
Ford is the president. Okay, he's the president. He's on
Air Force One. Some terrorists get on his plane. I
think they're led by Gary Oldman from what I remember.

(41:10):
They attack him. He says, get off my plane and
he fights them. And so this came out in July,
and I found a Time CNN article from that summer
reacting to the movie Air Force One and comparing its
Air Force one set to the real Air Force one. Now,
in the movie, actually the plane has an escape pod.

(41:31):
The article speaks to a White House aid confirms there
is no escape pod in the real Air Force one,
but apparently Bill Clinton wanted one. Well you come in.
I think they were joking, that's what they said. Well,
I mean you come back to the economic model. This
is one of the cases where it would make sense
right to have an ejection capsule for the most powerful

(41:54):
individual in the United States. I don't know how much
does the president cost um. I think there are there
are price tag evaluations available now on that topic. But
it makes sense that they might have one in that scenario,
But apparently they don't. However, would they let us know
if there was one? Uh, that's a good quition. Maybe
they're just psyching us out. I have heard of certain

(42:15):
situations with informational websites with information about Air Force One
being asked to, you know, cut down on the detail.
Really yeah, wow, interest to the great fun Uh so
I don't know. You can you can run with the
conspiracy theories there, maybe there's a secret escape pod. Alright, Well,
on that note, we're going to take a break, a

(42:35):
quick break for you. We're actually going to take a
break for several days, and they come back in and
finish this. So if we sound a little different, if
we sound better, healthier, if we sound worse, if you
sound a little sicker, well it's because a few days past.
But when we come back few days contemplating the torture chamber. Yes,
when we come back, though, we were going to get
into escape pods in space exploration, both actual and the

(42:59):
merely host. All right, we're back. So we've been talking
about aviation, escape pods, escape capsules, But what about outer space,
Like that's the next most dangerous environment. Like if if
the air, if the the upper atmosphere is not dangerous enough,
let's go beyond the upper atmosphere, let's go into orbit

(43:21):
and possibly rooms beyond. What do we do about escaping
those situations? Well, space is the natural home of the
escape pod, isn't it, Because if we if we see
it in sci fi most often, like that's where you
get in the capsule, you blast down to tattooing or
wherever that that. That's where we really see escape pods
come to fruition. And it is quite true that humans
have designed escape pods for spacecraft. Now, they're kind of

(43:44):
different than they are in the movies, because what happens
in a movie like oh, I don't know, aliens or
something like that, where there there are capsules that you're
you're in deep space and you get into a capsule
to blast away from a ship that is exploding or
infested with aliens or some thing like that, and then
what do you do? You just drift off into space.
So well, there's no I mean, that's not very useful

(44:06):
as far as things go right now, because we do
not have deep rescue vehicles in deep space operating between
planets and star systems. This is one of the ideas
that came up in Pandora, is that is that everyone
would would go mad on the ship and you'd go
into your escape pods and you blast off in the
escape pods, and then you just die out there because
nobody's coming to pick you up exactly. I mean, what's

(44:28):
the point. But there may be a point if you're
talking about stuff that stays really close to Earth, which
almost all well all of our all of our crewed
spacecraft so far have So in the early days of
crewed space flight, there were a lot of proposals for
various types of escape pods, and I actually found I
couldn't believe this. I found an issue of Popular Science

(44:50):
from September nineteen sixty six with an article called quote
lifeboats in Space by none other than Dr Werner von Braun,
all about the all about the subject of rescue from
orbital vehicles. Vernon von Broun, of course, the famed former
German rocket scientists who came to the US after the

(45:10):
war with I think you've mostly stationed out of Huntsville, Alabama,
and uh yeah, contributed a great deal to our space program. Yeah,
so von Braun says, so far, and this is nineteen
sixty six. Remember, space missions have been very safe. But
we're gonna have to expect that at some point a
crewed spacecraft will signal distress. What then, I mean, imagine

(45:33):
it's the nineteen sixties. What happens if there's a problem, right,
I mean, you have no recourse yet. So what he's
proposing is we need a space rescue program. So he says,
imagine a crew is stuck in a spacecraft in lower
th orbit caused by a malfunctioning retro rocket. Von Braun
essentially compares this to the situation of like a fishing

(45:55):
boat that gets stuck off shore at sea and starts sinking.
If you call for help and evacuate the crew into
a lifeboat, you can probably be saved. But we need
to develop the equivalent structures for rescue within space. You
need to develop lifeboats and rescue vehicles for space and
orbital flight the same way you'd have them for for

(46:17):
the ocean, right off the coast. So you would have
to send the orbital equivalent of a coastguard cutter essentially
to rescue a spacecraft in trouble. But that's difficult because
you have to wait for an appropriate launch window to
allow a rendezvous between the two ships. As we know
from rocket launches, you can't just fly up there, you
know what I mean. It's not like getting in a

(46:38):
helicopter and heading off. That you're dealing with with massively
powerful velocities and great mass, so you essentially have to
aim your gun the right way to start with. Yeah,
it's an enormous undertaking. Yeah, and so, so you've got
to get this rendezvous between the two ships. And if
the ship in distress is suffering a real emergency, it

(46:59):
might be too long for them to wait for somebody
on Earth to line up the trajectory of the launch
and wait for the correct launch window. Um so uh.
For example, a substantial number of spacecraft and emergencies we
just know are going to demand immediate rescue. They're going
to be very urgent. For example of von Braun. It
gives the example of fire. This was back when NASA

(47:20):
was using oxygen environments and in its spacecraft. That don't
do that anymore. Yeah, exactly, and it led to disasters
in the history of the space program. Or another thing
might be penetration of the spacecraft by a heavy, heavy meteoroid.
You know, you get pelted with something, it breaks through
the hull. You've got to escape immediately. You can't wait

(47:41):
for rescue vehicle obviously, can collision with another spacecraft would
be a problem, or toxic fumes in the cabin or
maybe radiation contamination from He gives the example of an
onboard nuclear power source. Wow, that sounds pretty awful, but anyway,
So von Broun concludes that we need to think about
the concept of lifeboats that allow spacecraft crews to escape

(48:04):
immediately on their own terms. So he's what he's proposing
is escape pods. And so I'm going to mention a
few that are illustrated alongside this article from sixty six.
And these illustrations are great, by the way. So one
example that he gives is the emergency cocoon, and he says,
this is under test by General Electric quote shelters shipwrecked

(48:27):
spaceman in an inflated fabric ball, heat insulated by outer
later outer layers of aluminiumized plastic thin silicon rubber lining
retains oxygen carried for breathing, but let's unwanted carbon dioxide
and water vapor escape. So they're putting you in a
beach ball. Yeah, it's like a survival bubble kind of
the situation. You climb into a beach ball, you blast

(48:49):
off from your ship, and you just float around in
orbit in your beach ball until the rescue vehicle can
come up and get to you, you know, when you
can't remain in your ship. The other one would be
the separable shelter and This looks more like a huge
thermus that everybody gets in. Right. It also reminds like
both of these remind me of like toys you can

(49:09):
buy it ikea. The first one of ball. This second
one is like one of these little tunnels that you get.
Who It's like a like a fabric tunnel that you
stretch out and then children can crawl through. Yeah. So
von Brand says that the separable shelter it holds five
to fifteen men and can serve as a life raft
for large space vehicles of the future. Uh, And it
has rocket self propulsion that can boost it to higher,

(49:32):
longer lived orbit that allows more time for rescue. So
these are more like the sort of roomy escape shuttles
of sci fi movies. But they still require ultimate rendezvous
with the rescue vehicle that's going to gather the crew
and return to Earth under its own specifications. Right, These
things are not going to re enter the Earth's atmosphere
in their current form. Right. What if you want to

(49:53):
make an escape pod that will get you all the
way home on your own, Well, that's gonna be a
different undertake altogether, exactly. So it makes no sense to
have a full on re entry capable space ship inside
your regular spaceship, at least on the scale that we
create spaceships right now. Because spacecraft were then and are
still now totally optimized for weight and volume like that,

(50:17):
they tend to be very small, pack tight, and to
have as light as possible a design to make launch
economically feasible. For really crude understanding of this, if you've
never thought about it before, just look at the size
of the orbiter vehicle itself compared to the size of
the rockets used to get it in orbit with any
given launch. It's hilarious. There's usually there's way more fuel

(50:39):
than there is spaceship um, and so it's not feasible
to make a spaceship within your spaceship to get you home.
So how could you make a self contained re entry
vehicle that would be very light and fit in storage
on the already cramped crew vehicles of the nineteen sixties. Well,
some geniuses in space design and aeronautics in the nineteen

(51:01):
sixties had a solution to this, and it was inflatable options.
So we already mentioned the beach ball floating in space,
but this would be the beach ball that you re
enter the burning atmosphere through or I guess the atmosphere
is not burning, but once you're re entering the atmosphere
high velocity, you will be burning. So the space historian

(51:22):
James Oberg has a good article about this from two
thousand three called the Pod People Nice Reference, published in
Air and Space magazine, and he talks about how in
the early days of the space program, researchers were experimenting
with inflatable re entry vehicles called things like the inflatable
micro meteoroid paraglider. And this wasn't originally meant as an

(51:42):
escape pod, but as a research probe to fly up
in space and get pelted by micro medieroids, essentially to
try to figure out, you know, what's the density of
solid objects in Earth or but if you go up
in space, how often can you expect to get hit
by hard stuff? And so there were research vehicles like this,
but they also actually it end up designing inflatable re
entry vehicles, uh with with the designs essentially resembling as

(52:07):
I already said, paragliders, but they would have a heat
shield of some kind so that when you re enter
the atmosphere you don't catch on fire and burn up
and explode. One of the designs he mentions is a
modified rog Gallo wing, which is basically a hang glider,
but imagine sort of a hang glider with struts that,
instead of being made of metal, are a fabric tube

(52:29):
that gets inflated with gas to such a high pressure
that it becomes rigid. And so that's what we're dealing with.
But back to von Braun in nine in the nineteen
sixty six because he's going to point out, uh, some
of these crazy personal reentry vehicles that were under development
at the time he was writing. The first is the
space parachute, which he says is a is a concept

(52:52):
from Douglas and essentially it's an ejector seat sort of
like you would see in like a like a five
or jet, you know, if you have to eject, so
you're in your seat, and then you've got a retro
rocket that you used to orient yourself to de orbit
to come down back into the atmosphere. Um. And then
you've got this what what he calls a conical drag

(53:14):
skirt that deploys for self stabilizing reentry, so sort of
like a bowl extends around the seat. Yeah, if you
were to take like a very small baby doll, like
one about the size of you know, uh, you know,
about half the size of your index finger, put it
in a large metal bowl or like a tinfoil boil bowl,
and drop that bowl through a planetary atmosphere. That would

(53:36):
be what you'd be talking about here. Yeah, so that's
scary enough. But I want to get to the most
epically horrifying space escape capsule concept that I've come across
in the in research for this episode. And so this
thing was called moose and it was developed by General
Electric in the nineteen sixties. And according to James Oberg again,

(53:57):
the acronym moose originally stood for He says, man out
of Space Easiest is not an actual moose because no, okay,
but because we have had actual bears in escape pops
capsules already in this episode. Thank you for reminding me, Robert.
But no, they did as far as I know, they
did not test it on any ungulates. Is a moose

(54:19):
and ungulate I think it is? Yeah, okay, okay, um,
I should know my ungulates. But but no, no, no,
So the name was changed to stand for it like
they back renimmed it. You know they said, No, what
actually stands for is manned orbital operations safety equipment, which
is a little tortured. But okay, yeah, I mean you

(54:40):
really don't want to tell an astronaut that he or
she must climb into a device that's got the word
easiest in the title. Yeah. Well, but but I like
the idea of summoning the idea of the Moose for
your entry, because the Moose is rugged, the Moose is tough,
the moose, the moose is a you know, a stubborn,
willful creature, much like the astronauts. Uh zeal for life. Right,

(55:01):
so uh, and I do want to warn you you
should look up the Moose to get some some of
the illustrations of this thing. But also you might have
some trouble if you're if you're trying to look it up,
because there is another NASA project called Moose that stands
for something totally different and appears to me to be
a completely different thing. So space program really as Moose
is coming out both this is a fort NASA discovered

(55:22):
the rich pantheon of say Egyptian deities. Why we'll just
start we'll just plunder this, uh, this mythology and then
we don't have two things called moose. But okay, here's
the whole nightmare, as described by by von Bronze article.
So it says, quote self rescue moose a general electric
idea in cases, astronaut in a plastic bag that fills

(55:45):
with polyurethane foam to assume re entry shape. He uses
retrorocket to de orbit, then discards it. Bag has foldable
heat shield for re entry and parachute that automatically inferls
itself for landing. So if you're having trouble picturing that,
let me try to narrativise this a little bit. So
here's the way it works. Major Tom realizes, oh no,

(56:07):
my spacecraft is on fire and my pure oxygen environment
is raging out of control. Why did we do this? Well,
no time for recriminations. I must climb into the escape pod.
But really, the escape pod is a plastic bag with
a foldable sheet of elastomeric ablative heat shielding material. And
so he folds this thing out and the heat shield

(56:29):
folds out to about one point eight meters in diameter,
and then uh with him, He's got a canister of polyurethane.
So he gets into the folded heat shield and he
pulls a rip chord and this opens up the canister
of polyurethane, which which fills it up, fills up the
shield with polyurethane foam. So at this point the astronaut

(56:51):
has entombed themselves within a lump of polyurethane. Yeah. Yeah,
it's sort of the break and bake style of escape
pod creation. It's on the fly. Uh. So then you're
out of the ship and Major Tom's floating in space
in this bag on a bed of foam, and Major
Tom fires a small canister of gas propellant to orient
himself with the heat shield facing the proper direction for

(57:13):
re entry, and then he discards the gas propellant and
he uses a hand operated solid rocket engine to enter
the atmosphere. So Tom Tom's in a bag on some foam,
rocketing himself back to Earth by hand. There's a fabulous
mcgever kind of yeah. So, once in free fall in

(57:34):
the atmosphere, he opens a chest mounted parachute and then
comes down to the surface for a landing. And according
to the Encyclopedia Astronautica, General Electric, General Electric conducted a
bunch of tests and showed that the basic design of
moose worked, and they eventually tested it out on a
falling scenario by dropping a test pilot in a moose

(57:56):
six meters off of a bridge in Massachusetts, and they
say that the test pilot survived the impact. Congratulations falling
off a bridge in this thing. But anyway, Von Braun
writes of this and quote the space parachute that both
fold up for storage and a spacecraft both combine the
characteristics of a life raft, a space suit, overcoat and

(58:18):
a cocoon, which is just putting it in such a
soothing way. But then he goes on to point out
that while self rescue devices like these they will get
you back down to Earth, maybe not every time, but
you know, at least in theory they work, but they
won't guarantee that you will survive once you land. I
like that he points that out. This is a good

(58:38):
point because this is supposedly why the Russians and the
say used vehicle carried a survival pack up up and
back to space containing guns and ammunition. There was at
least one crash where there were there were wolves on
the prow. Yeah, this gun, if you ever get a
chance to read about it, is pretty interesting. So this,
the say used survival packet had a gun with three

(59:00):
barrels and a folding stock, and they said it also
worked as a shovel and had a swing out machete
in it. And then it also fired three types of ammunition,
which was rifle bullets, flares, and shotgun shells, which that
sounds like a gun you'd have in a video game. Yeah.
And again it's important to stress just the immense cost
of taking anything into orbit. So the fact that this

(59:22):
gun came on the journey and came back just in
the event that it would be helpful, Um, you know,
it says a lot. I'm so glad this never led
to shotgun and machete battles in space on the space station. Well,
you know, I actually would love to do an episode,
maybe a short episode, on this very topic, because there's
some wonderful material out there about actual, uh incidents of

(59:46):
guns in space, but also some proposed ideas that never
really took off. UH guns in space. Wow, that sounds
like such a horrible idea, But but then again, I
don't think this is stupid because, like we said, you
can understand if you land way off course in the wilderness,
it probably helps to have some survival equipment. Yeah, indeed,
I mean, yeah, these things are gonna come down in

(01:00:07):
the in the wilderness. Who might need some survival equipment. Uh.
And the moose actually came with some gear oriented towards
on the ground survival as well, So it had a
survival kit, food and water, plus things to help the
astronaut be found. So it had a thing called us
so far bomb that's so far as an acurnym, which
is a device that uses an underwater explosion to allow

(01:00:29):
precise signaling of your location to people who are listening
for underwater sounds. It also had radar chaff and some
flares and that The Popular Science article has this awesome
illustration of the moose that Robert, I think you enjoyed
it as much as I did. But the astronaut has
a very placid face in this picture where he's laying

(01:00:51):
in this bed of foam that looks like it's just
a blob that's gonna envelop him and digest him. Yeah,
and the um and and the rockets that he's going
to use to maneuver. It has the look kind of
like a cross between a Hoover vacuum and like a
divining rod. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, he's holding this big
wishbone full of fire. But yeah, but this is great.

(01:01:15):
I would love to see this utilized in some sort
of an action sequence, you know, the sort of do
it yourself re entry where our action hero just has
to grab these two canisters, jump out of the of
the spacecraft and just make their way back down to
the here. Well, there are some great scenes in movies.
I don't want to spoil anything about movies that exist

(01:01:35):
because this usually is like the very end of the
sci fi movie. But they involved things like this, like
basically outside of vehicle maneuvering. That's very scary when you
think about it. I mean, to be lost in space
without any means of propulsion and safe reentry is is
just a death sentence. Can we name any of those
movies or it would be it would just be too

(01:01:56):
much of a spoiler. Well, I know, I know. One
of course is like gravity and Mues have some some
cool re entry stuff at the end. Yeah. There there's
also some stuff. And in the Martian did you see them? Yeah,
that's right, and there's some outside vehicle maneuvering. Okay, I
think maybe in both those films. I was falling asleep
towards the end. Uh you know, and it's but hey,
we're not going to spoil and say whether the individual

(01:02:18):
survived or not, because that, of course is the big,
big deal. It's one thing to initiate re entry. It's
another thing to actually make it all the way to
the Earth surface again and still be alive. Oh and
I guess that does give away that I did finally
see The Martian. People were asking after we did that
how to Die on Mars episode, people were like, hey,
have you read The Martian? I don't know if the

(01:02:39):
movie was out yet, but when people were asking if
I read the book because it covered a lot of
the same stuff we talked about. Yeah, it had not then,
but I have now. In keeping with that beach ball
design we had we talked about earlier, there's actually a
pre Challenger Shuttle era idea for a personal rescue enclosure
or pre rescue ball. This was in like eight success

(01:03:00):
centimeter diameter high tech beach ball for transport of astronauts
from space from from a spacecraft in distress to the
space shuttle. Uh So crew members would climb into the ball,
they'd assume a fetal position and they'd be zipped inside
by a space suited crew member. Huh, so this is
this is like what we were talking about towards the
beginning of of Von Bronze article, where you you'd get

(01:03:22):
into a some kind of survival capsule and just wait
for rescue. Yeah and uh and again this was a
pre Challenger project from a time during which Shuttle crews
wore no space suits on board the Shuttle afterwards. Afterwards, however,
they wore pressure suits during liftoff. Again. Yeah, well that
seems like a smart idea. But okay, So Moose and

(01:03:43):
its contemporaries were basically shelved, but other space escape pod
concepts came to the four and some of them were
actually realized. Yeah. Yeah. For instance, there's the Jim and
I l s r S. So you know, obviously no
one wanted to go wind up stranded on the Moon,
yet the risk of this happening were rather high during
the Apollo Moon missions. As such, NASA designed the Gemini

(01:04:06):
Lunar Surface Rescue Spacecraft l s r S. And the
idea here is that in the event of the crew
wound up stranded on the Moon, NASA could send this
unmanned craft to their landing site that would be a
thirty day trip, and then the two crew members could
then board the craft to make a direct return to Earth.
NASA also developed an orbital variant aimed at rescuing three

(01:04:27):
individuals marooned in lunar orbit, as well as a lunar
surface survival survival shelter model aimed at giving astronauts on
the surface a little more time to await like a
full blown, uh, you know, manned rescue, and they eventually
planned to produce a universal lunar rescue vehicle to perform
all three tasks for a trio of astronauts. But this

(01:04:50):
was one of this one of those sort of later
day Apollo ideas that really came about too late. Like
our our interest in the Moon was was going away
at that point. Can you imagine and though actually being
stuck on the surface of the Moon for thirty days
waiting for you it's crazy. It's like I was trying
to sort of put it in terms of thinking about
like my own household. So at our house, we we

(01:05:11):
currently have two cars, new car and old car. And
if I go, if I drive to the grocery store,
if the car breaks down, a I can walk back
from the grocery store, or my wife can come and
pick me up in the car in the other car,
or something to that effect. You know. But this is
a kind of situation where there's there's only one car,
or it's gonna take or it's gonna take a tremendous

(01:05:31):
amount of effort to get a second car available, and
then to gas it up and send it on its
journey to pick you up at this impossible store and
you're driving to the middle of the desert in Arizona. Yeah, yeah,
it's um yeah. So I kept trying to put it
in in sort of like logistical, real life surface world terms,
and uh, you know, some some models work, but some
just ultimately fall short of capturing the just severe isolation.

(01:05:57):
Like the closest thing I guess would be to just
to set out to the middle of the Arctic Ocean,
you know. Uh. Well, hey, so I've got a question. Yeah,
what happens if you have to escape the International Space Station? Well,
luckily there there is a way, so um yeah, So
let's say are in the International Space Station and uh,
something catastrophic happens, maybe there's space shrapnel or more problems

(01:06:20):
with the station's toilets, and those just get out of hand.
What some of the ammunition for the soy Use survival
kit just explodes, yeah, or you know, maybe just run
out of vodka. Whatever to the dilemma. There is an
escape craft on a hand, and it's one of those
Russian so use the space capsules. So we first flew
one to the I S. S in two thousand and
it's been it's been a fixture ever since. It can

(01:06:43):
survive re entry as what as with the two thousand
nine Space Junks scare, it can also provide just a
safe refuge daring of the scare um. And following the
two thousand three Columbia Shuttle disaster, the soy Use served
as the primary means of transport to and from the
I S. S U. The trip took up to two days,

(01:07:04):
and the trip back was a mere three point five hours.
So this is the idea here with the so us
is that it's kind of like, all right, I'm terrified
of my car breaking down on my way to the store.
Why don't I just keep a car at the store, ye, permanently,
and then I can always drive that pack if something
goes wrong. Um, that's kind of the the idea here.

(01:07:27):
So the only thing is that up to so only
up to three crew members can return to Earth from
the I S S a board of so US t
M A spacecraft. The vehicle lands on the flat steep
of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. There again, the return takes
about three and a half hours. And this is why
you can you can only have three people on the

(01:07:48):
I S S at any given time unless there's another
craft present, because you can only get three people out
in an emergency. Right. If you have a fourth person
there and you've got to evacuate, one of them is
going to be taken the moose, right And it's yeah,
it's I'm sorry, I'm just kidding. They don't actually have
as far as far as we know, but but yeah,
I mean, you can't clown card this thing. You can't

(01:08:09):
just pack a bunch of people in there and have
them sort of hold on to the sides of the capsule.
You mean, you have to there has you have to
strap yourself in there. There's their oxygen logistics in place,
so three people are less no more. Now, that's not
to say we haven't looked into other possibilities. More I
guess you could say refined possibilities than just having a

(01:08:31):
three person spaceship on hand up there. Um. At one
point NASA was looking into the X thirty eight. This
was the I S S Crew return vehicle, and this
is a really cool design. It basically looked like a
mini like stubby Space Shuttle, UM and and this would
have this would have allowed them, you know, more individuals
to return from I S S to Earth. But it

(01:08:53):
was a pretty pre costly program. According to a Wired
magazine article from the time, the program had cost around
five million dollars so far, and then it was just
fifty million shy of completing its flight test. When basically
under the Georgia W. Bush administration, UH space and the

(01:09:15):
and re visiting the Moon became devalued as an objective,
so the X thirty eight went away as a possibility. Now.
It's also worth noting that one of the more dangerous
things about rocket propulsion into space is just taking off.
It's kind of like with with aviation. Of course, that's
the dangerous stent. That's that's when you have this enormous

(01:09:36):
explosion strapped to the bottom of the craft propelling you
up out of the atmosphere. So as as has become
important in the past, having a means of ejecting the
capsule from the top of that massive explosive rocket is
often highly advisable. And as we're going more and more
into into that launch style, we're seeing more and more

(01:09:59):
of a earned to that UM. So in a way,
we're going back to technology that we used with Mercury
and Apollo spacecraft. We see this in the form of
a basic launch escape system. So you have a talk
mounted rocket on the capsule that in the event of
a mishap during takeoff, can blast the man capsule clear
of the rocket and allow it to parachute back to
the surface. That seems very useful. Yeah, the sell Us

(01:10:22):
uses this, UH, this technology, and there are a number
of man spacecraft that are currently in development, UH, several
of which are capsule based and you know would also
employ this. So we're talking about like UH, NASA's Ryan
Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle SpaceX. UH they're Dragon V two.
There's also the the U S Bowing CST one hundred. UM.

(01:10:43):
There's a there's a quote here that I found from
SpaceX officials and they said it's similar to an injection
seat for a fighter pilot, but instead of ejecting the
pilot out of the spacecraft, the entire spacecraft is ejected
away from the launch vehicle. And that is something that
I guess you can think of as as somewhat practical
to do cause of this inherent separation between the spacecraft

(01:11:03):
capsule and the launch vehicle itself. This is a natural division,
because they're going to be separating anyway at some point
during the ascent. Correct, Yeah, they're they're they're separate entities anyway. Yeah,
all right, we're gonna take a quick break and when
we come back, we are going to look at a
few more escape pods for some stranger scenarios involving natural disasters. So, Joe,

(01:11:29):
you grew up in like Middle Tennessee, didn't you? Or
you or not? A lot of tornadoes in Chattanooga. We
got tornadoes. Yeah, we actually tornadoes have been right through
my parents neighborhood before, like right through the backyard. Okay,
I wasn't there at the time, but it's it's definitely
it can be scary when they whip through. Yeah. Indeed,

(01:11:51):
I mean I I haven't grown up in Middle Tennessee.
We had we had a lot of tornado scares as well,
and so that that possibility was always in the back
of my mind growing up. You know, the tornado could common.
What can you do? What can you do against the tornado?
It this titanic force of nature that's just going to
destroy everything in its path. Let's see, can we look
to movies for inspiration? What do they do in that
movie Twister? I believe they throw a candy bar in

(01:12:14):
one direction and then run in the other, and then
so that they distract the tornado with the candy blocks. Right,
I think that's how that went down. Uh No, generally
in uh in tornado movies and in tornado reality, like,
all you can do is find shelter. Right, if you
have a if you have a storm shelter, if you
have a a fortified storm basement, Um, you can run
in there, blatch the door, and just ride it out.

(01:12:36):
But it is very important, very important that your shelter
be a high quality shelter, like a building with a foundation.
Uh not necessarily something like a trailer. In fact, I
have often heard the advice given to people who are
living in mobile homes and trailers, anything that's not solidly
anchored to the ground or built on a foundation that

(01:12:58):
you're better off not in the trailer than in it,
because it essentially just turns into a death machine if
a tornado comes through and you're inside a mobile home. Yeah,
so I think we've all consumed images'd be they mental images,
cinematic or otherwise, of trailers and mobile homes just sucked
up into the sky by deadly twisters, or certainly trailer

(01:13:19):
parks that have been devastated by actual tornadoes. But what
have you what have you actually had an escape pode
for your trailer? Uh? Now, before you envision a rocket
propelled trailer bathroom that blasts you away from the crumbling,
wind gripped trailer as it's you know, sucked into the
sky amid all the debris. Um, remember this as as

(01:13:41):
as a twister sucks the trailer up into the air,
what you want to do is stay firmly fixed to
the ground. Sure, I mean that's ultimately the design of
any escape capsule is getting me back to the surface
of the earth. But in this case, you're already on
the surface, so you just need to remain there at
all costs. So I'm following you so far, So where

(01:14:02):
do escape pods come in. Well, as far as I know,
this does not. This has has not been built yet.
Maybe some individuals have have taken it upon themselves to
build it. I hope so, and if they did, I
would love to see the photos. But no, we're going
to talk about We're going into the wildest corners of
the patent internet. Yeah, particularly a patent for a tornado
escope escape capsule for trailer homes. Yeah, it's it is.

(01:14:26):
It's pretty ingenious. It's essentially a little safe room in
your trailer, anchored to the ground, and it consists of
the following. This is from the patent. First, an opening
formed in the floor of the house trailer and positioned
directly below said internal compartment, So if you're in your
compartment and underneath it there's like a hole in the floor.
An escape capsule dimensioned to be received and releasably supported

(01:14:49):
within set internal compartment. And then you have a ground
engaging anchor position beneath set internal compartment in the house trailer,
and then a tether that's connected between the escape capsule
and the grounding anchor. So it's it is like this
fancy little capsule in your trailer. There's a hole in
the trailer underneath it, and it's anchored to the ground firmly. Okay,

(01:15:11):
so I said, this is kind of ingenious. But I mean,
if you're gonna go to the trouble to build this thing,
why not just anchor your trailer to the ground. Well, yeah,
you can. You can make that argument, and maybe that's
why this wasn't built. But but the I guess the
the the argument here is this way, you don't have
to anchor the entire trailer to the ground. You just

(01:15:31):
anchor this one little safe him. Okay, well maybe in fact,
I don't know. I mean, I I assume most of
the danger of being in a trailer or a mobile
home when a tornado comes through comes from the fact
that it's not anchored and can be tossed around. But
maybe there is additional danger, uh, from being in the trailer,
Like if the if essentially, if the building materials are
not sturdy enough, does it does it get shredded and

(01:15:54):
turned into a bunch of knives flying at you that
were formerly the walls and ceiling. Yeah, I don't know,
but but maybe maybe this would avert that. Yeah, and
you know, and I guess also it's It's kind of
comes back to that old Seinfeldt about why don't they
just make the airplane out of whatever they made the
black box out of? Right? Like some maybe it's just

(01:16:14):
not it's not economically feasible to offer the trailer as
a fully anchored, fully storm proof living option. But but
what it Probably they probably don't do that because the
airplane couldn't get off the ground, right, But but what
if you could just have this one little capsule in
the house. But then I'd also that The thing is,
anyone who's ever been in a trailer before, and I

(01:16:36):
certainly have you, you don't have a lot of room
in there anyway. So the other thing is, how do
you sacrifice the room for this compartment unless you end
up utilizing it for something else, like I guess you
have to. You could use it as a closet, But
then I can well imagine the scenario where someone looks
out the window or they turn on the radio, Oh
my goodness, there's a twister coming. I've got to clean

(01:16:56):
out the closet because that is my only chance to
survive evil. And so you're frantically trying to move everything
out of the board. Games. We never even play these, yeah,
or you know, because other options, what you could have
it be the bathroom. How would that work to have
your your bathroom be the escape capsule? The showers? What
I was thinking. You get into the shower and it's
like a I don't know why the shower I guess

(01:17:17):
I don't know, because it's like a it's like a
sealed off little box in a certain way. Yeah, Like, okay,
I could see that working, and and you would You
would probably not fill the shower up with just a
bunch of junk in the meantime, and the fact that
you would use the shower would make it remain an
open option for escape capsule. Right. Then again, you wouldn't

(01:17:38):
want to be flying around inside the shower and bashing
your head against the faucet, right, So you'd have to
have like a shower like at padding and straps on
the walls, strap yourself in man a padded shower. They'll
probably get a little mildewy, wouldn't it if the material
was right? I don't know. I think we're updating the
patent here. I think we have some great ideas. Uh okay, well,

(01:18:00):
I've got another escape pod for a sort of escape
pod for natural disasters, and these are tsunami survival capsules.
There are multiple designs have come across for this. Yes,
it sounds crazy, but I could find evidence of at
least a couple of real companies that have created and
manufactured tsunami escape pod. So the first one is a

(01:18:22):
product that was known as the Noah or Noah's Arc
and it was created by a Japanese company called Cosmo
Power almost ten years ago. I got some press in
two thousand eleven, I assume related to the March two
thousand eleven earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. But basically
it looks like a giant yellow ball with a hatch

(01:18:44):
and a little porthole window near the top. And the
yellow color is strategic because it hopefully makes the escape
capsule easier for rescuers to find once the devastation is over.
Uh And the structure is made of enhanced fiberglass and
the company claims it is strong enough to withstand earthquakes, hurricanes,
and tsunamis. But so the obvious ideas of tsunami is coming,

(01:19:06):
you've got one of these things, I don't know, I
guess you would have it sitting out in your backyard
or something. You'd want to have it a place where
you could float free, wherever it is on the roof
of the house. Maybe maybe yeah, But everybody, you realize
the tsunami is coming. You climb into this thing, and
it has enough room inside to hold four adults. Inside.
There is a floor and a pole, just a metal

(01:19:27):
pole going straight through the center of the sphere. And
I guess that is to cling to while you're hoping
this thing works. But anyway, according to an ABC News report,
the shelters were selling for about four thousand dollars apiece
in two thousand eleven. I don't know if this company
still exists in any form, or if these things are
still made, or if anybody has ever used one successfully,

(01:19:49):
But there is one product. I'd make of it what
you will the product, and they would. That's the thing too,
there selling the product. They're selling the idea of the
skate a capsule more than anything, much like you know,
much like a storm shelter or a bomb shelter. It's
the idea that there is an escape. It's an idea
that if the tsunami occurs, if the tornado occurs, if yeah,

(01:20:11):
you know, nuclear armageddon occurs, there is some sort of
an escape, There is some so there's an escape capsule
for this scenario that my my primitive parts of my
brain can can feel good about. Yeah. Obviously I claim
no expertise in how to survive high energy events, but
I looking at these things, I do have to wonder.

(01:20:31):
It's like, okay, so they float, that's good. You're you're
not gonna get trapped underwater hopefully, you know, so you're
in this thing, you'll float up to the top eventually
and be rescued. But also, you know, a tsunami is
an incredibly high energy event, and so it's gonna have
you bashing around at things. Now they can probably I guess,
pad the inside of this thing, but you're also going

(01:20:52):
to be in there with other people, and there's this
metal pole for you to hold onto. I just wonder
if when you open this thing up at the end,
is it is going to be like a big bloody
mess inside unless you pack enough. Sorry for the horrible image,
but unless you do, you do go complete clown car
in this and you just make sure that you fill
it up completely, and then some individuals survives, some don't.
It's kind of like there's like not enough room for

(01:21:14):
you to knock around. Yeah, yeah, you kind of. You do,
like the different species of ants that make barges out
of themselves, you know. Well, anyway, there is another tsunami
survival capsule that came across a similar device created by
aircraft engineers Julian Sharp and Scott Hill. And this one
it's got its own website. And instead of being yellow,

(01:21:36):
this is a red orange color. And instead of the
minimalist floor and poll interior layout, the survival capsule has
fitted seats with seat belts that look kind of like
pilot's chairs, and it seats to to ten adults depending
on the model. I just want to read off some
of the standard features. Uh. Safety seating with four point

(01:21:57):
harness straps, storage space with efficient for they say sufficient
for five days, supply per person, supply of what I'm
not quite sure, water storage, internal light, GPS, air ventilation
vents uh that they say it's high visibility unit, color,
air supply tanks, hard restraints support uh, watertight marine door

(01:22:22):
and a marine standard window, little porthole. But then this
was the thing that got me. They said, Okay, so
all that stuff Okay, you can see why you'd have
all those things. But they've also got optional features they advertise,
including surround sound music system. This would be a must,
I think, And I've got to to two reasons here. Okay.

(01:22:42):
First of all, ambient music has a tremendous soothing qualities.
Music for airports, bran, you know, and that's what will
get you through, you know. And maybe he would have
he would he would create a custom composition, you know,
music for yeah, but yeah, you'll be able to calm
yourself down. But the other thing is, if you pay

(01:23:04):
you know, I'm guessing a fairly ridiculous sum for this
upscale survival capsule, you might want to spend some time
in it, like I would want to. I would if
I had a stressful day. I don't want to go
home and just climb into my survival capsule and maybe
crank some tunes. I'm with you, I can see it. Yeah,
it can be your safe place. Okay, what are my

(01:23:24):
other options? I'm already on board for the music. You
can pay up for dry powder, seat toilet, Okay. So
I don't know, because on one hand, we we all
who have access to modern plumbing or very grateful for
that that luxury. Many people throughout human history have not
had such luxuries. But do you really want I don't know.

(01:23:48):
I mean, on one hand, I guess it might be
better than the alternative, But I'm just thinking about the
idea of human waste slashing around in a survival capsule.
I mean, I guess maybe it's going to be coming
out either way, and it's just a question do you
have a toilet or not? Yeah, And I'm wondering what
this consists of, because it instantly makes me think of
overnight canoe trip, the trips that I've been on where

(01:24:09):
you were required by the park to have a toilet
option on the canoe, and what what we had was,
and instance, it's kind of an escape capsule. It was
a folder's coffee can with kitty letter in it. In
the event that you needed to use the restroom in there,
you certainly could. It would not be fun, but it
could be done. And just having it there, you know,
made you feel a little easier and made the park

(01:24:31):
rangers feel a little easier. I guess. So maybe it's
all psychological, Yeah, I think, I mean, that's that's a
large part of any escape system. That's true. Yeah, you
got to manage your mind. But then there's additional internal lighting.
You can pay up for solar panel array that would
that survive a tsunami external solar panel array and you're

(01:24:51):
getting hit by a giant wave. I mean maybe if
it was properly shielded with some sort of you know,
like a like a really firm plexiglass of situation. I'm
wondering about that. But then additional internal insulation acoustic and thermal.
And then finally they've got color options. And I thought
the whole point was we wanted to be visible though, Yeah,

(01:25:11):
well it's this red orange color. I mean, the other
one's a yellow color. I'd imagine either one could be visible,
so maybe you can also be yellow. It would be
horrible if you wanted to pick a survival capsule that
was like, I don't know, seawater gray. Yeah, yeah, surely
they wouldn't allow that. But maybe like zebra stripes, I
could see where there might be some sort of custom

(01:25:32):
I catching color. You'd go for a racing stripe, yea
NASCAR number, though, I do want to say, I mean,
while the concept of these capsules is kind of funny
to me, obviously I mean, if you reckon it all
with the real outcome of a tsunami, I mean, these
are some of the most devastating natural disasters in all
the world and all of world history and uh and

(01:25:54):
and it can be truly horrifying. And it's one of
those things where you think, while there really is no
great escape from this if you don't have for warning.
Um and so, anybody who could design a viable tsunami
survival capsule that people could really use to survive could
be affordable too many. I mean, I think that would
be a worthwhile thing to pursue. So I don't want to.

(01:26:16):
I don't want to just make jokes about what these
people are doing. I don't know, the toilet seems a
little funny to me, but but yeah, I mean, if
you can actually make a capsule and you can get
it to the people who are most vulnerable to tsunamis,
I think that's a noble thing to do. Plus, let's
face it, if if you can't laugh about pooping in
a coffee canister right on the on the on the

(01:26:37):
escape barge, on the in the survival capsule, then what's
the purpose of surviving? You know, because our humanity has
to survive, and that entails being able to laugh at
the prospect of pooping in a folder's canister. That humorous
gesture would be the true presence of a happy spirit
on board. Alright, So I have one more example of
an escape capsule to discuss here. So many of the

(01:27:00):
capsules we've mentioned share the same mission, right to return
adventurous humans to the Earth's surface from a malfunctioning aircraft
to the surface, etcetera. But what about when things go
hey wire beneath the surface of the Earth. Are you
talking about underground core drilling vehicles like in the Core? Um, well,
we're not quite there yet. Did they have an escape capsule,

(01:27:20):
like some sort of thing that came up. I'm sorry
to say this. I've never seen the Core. Oh yeah,
well it makes me this idea makes me think of
the the terror dome on a teenage muntant Ninja turtles, right,
because it would it would drill down, and I think
they had they had the equivalent of like a a
little drill vehicle that would come up that was kind
of like an escape capsule that the foot soldiers would

(01:27:42):
jump out of in the video game. Right, I don't
remember anything about that, but I believe you well it was.
It was fantastic and uh, you know, could probably not
exist in real life, but here's an example of something
that did. So you can find various mining escape capsule
patents out there, but the most notable deployment it real
life deployment of so of one of these systems came

(01:28:03):
in the wake of the two thousand ten Chilean mining acts.
And do you remember when this occurred. I don't. I mean,
I remember various mining accidents, but this one, the particulars
of it don't stand out to me. So what happened here,
So this was thirty three miners trapped seven hundred meters
that's feet underground and uh and about five kilometers or

(01:28:24):
three miles from the mind's interests entrants. So this was
a pretty big deal. They made a movie about it recently,
like I think they caught it thirty three or the
thirty three. Um, so they're they're trapped in this hostile environment. Um,
it's it's hot down there, it's dark. Uh, it's cramped,
and they've got to get out right, So to rescue them,
what they did is they utilize steel rescue capsules and

(01:28:48):
these these were updated takes on the torpedo like doll
Busch bomb that have been employed since the mid nineteen fifties.
Developed in Germany. Doll bush bomb. Yeah, that's what they
called it because I guess it kind of looks like
a bomb, kind of looks like a torpedo. And this
was used. This was employed again in the mid nineteen
fifties in a German mine. So they updated this. They

(01:29:11):
dubbed it the Phoenix and they were constructed by the
Chilean Navy with design input from NASA, and they implemented
most of NASA's changes. Uh So, when the when the
mining accident occurred, this was you know, this was a
big this is big news. It was captivating all the headlines.
Everyone's really concerned. There's a lot of international attention and
thus NASA's involvement as well. But I'm trying to imagine,

(01:29:34):
like what does a mine, a mine escape pod look like? Like,
how does that work? It basically looks like a torpedo.
And the idea is, all right, you're down there in
this this subterranean environment. If we can get a shaft
down there to you and we can potentially get you
back up or or if there's an adjacent shaft and
we can somehow get you to that shaft, etcetera. So this,

(01:29:54):
this Phoenix capsule consisted of again look kind of like
this torpedo looking device. Each one had retractable wheels to
allow for a smoother ride to the surface, so the
wheels would skit along the sides of the vertical shaft
that you're you're being pulled back up. Each one have
an oxygen supply, lighting, video and voice communications, reinforce roof

(01:30:15):
to protect against a foot rocks that are falling, because
rocks could fall uh down the tunnel that you're ascending
and you need protection against those. Um. And also an
escape hatch with a safety device to allow the passenger
to lower themselves back down if the capsule became stuck
on up. God, that would be scary. Yeah. So these

(01:30:35):
were these were pretty These were pretty amazing little devices. Um,
and they've I think they were they were making the
rounds for a little bit, like a little bit because
they were showing them off because they were able to
successfully get everyone out of the mind using the Phoenix capsules. Really, yeah,
this is weird. I'm feeling this. I don't usually experience
strong clustrophobia. But just now contemplating this, I'm overwhelmed. Well

(01:30:56):
you should. You should definitely check out more about the story.
There was a wonderful I want to say, was an
episode of the Ideas podcast out of Canada that into
it that I think the interviewed an author had written
a book about it. I think it's the same book
that the movie was based on, and they went into
detail just talking about just how bad the situation was,
and like the attitudes among the survivors and and what

(01:31:18):
was going on top side as well. So it's a
it's a really interesting human drama. I haven't seen the
movie yet, but it kind of makes me want to
see it. Interesting all right, So we've talked about aviation
escape pods, we've talked about space escapes pods, we've talked
about whether related escape pods, mining escape pods. What we
have possibly left out here, Um, you know, what they

(01:31:40):
need is a human body escape pod for the brain.
That's one of the cybernetic upgrades I'm hoping for. Yeah,
or it sounds more like a spiritual upgrade as well. No,
essentially is right the brain you get to maybe the
brain upper nervous system is encased in a survival eject capsule. Okay,
something bad happens to the body, your brain kind of

(01:32:01):
shoots out and waits for rescue. Huh. Well, I guess
the A more slightly more believable version of this would
be just the idea that that we would have our consciousness,
our memories backed up somewhere digitally, so that every you know,
I don't know how how often would you want to
be backed up? How much time are you willing to
lose in your life? Oh? You know every week? Yeah,

(01:32:22):
that's fine. So something happens, you just eject the SD card. Yeah,
remember to save after every important life event, because you'd
hate to be like, Oh, I just the birth of
my first child, and I forgot to save and then
I got I got hit by a car, And do
you know, don't worry. It's not the biggest tragedy in
the world, because I now I have my body back,
but I have no memory of the birth because I

(01:32:45):
did not save immediately after. Or you could look at
it the other way and say, if you don't save
after every great event, you get to relive and rediscover
the greatness of this great event over and over again.
I guess if you can pull it off a second time.
And isn't that the goal of any gate pod to
give you the chance to have a second go at
all of life's experiences. Well, we know we've not covered

(01:33:08):
all of the great escape capsules, pods, survival vehicles that
have ever been created. So if you've been thinking of
one out there and you're like, oh, why aren't you
talking about this? You should let us know. Yeah, let
us know about the fictional ones. Let us know about
the real life escape capsules. Let us know about some
of the proposed ones that just haven't come to fruition yet.

(01:33:28):
We would love to hear about them. And hey, let
us know you want to hear. Do you want to
hear an episode about fallout shelters? We could do it. Uh?
Does that? Does that episode about the guns and under
space interest you? Let us know we could do that
episode as well. Really, it's it's all, it's all on
the table. And if you want to get in touch
with us, reach out to us as stuff to blow
your mind. Dot com that's our mothership. That's we find

(01:33:49):
links out to our social media accounts, as well as
various podcast episodes, Blog post videos, you name it, and
if you want to get in touch with this directly
you can do so. As always that blow the mind.
Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on

(01:34:11):
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com by Believe the Big Do

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