To The Escape Pod!

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are you looking for brand new episodes of a short
How Stuff Works podcast that explains the everyday world around us,
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or anywhere else you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff

(00:22):
to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com.
Hey you, 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 for better or worse, often worse. But one

(00:45):
of any animal's deepest 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

(01:08):
lead to mass panics that kill people. This happens all
the time. Uh. And so the escape drive, 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

(01:31):
the term reptile brain, I 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 about it. When

(01:53):
you go into a room, even if there's no cause
of danger whatsoever, just say it's an office Christmas party
something like that. Oh yeah, you better believe I'm gonna
have an escape plane at 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

(02:13):
the exits are in the room. Do you do the
same thing, Robert, Yeah, Well, I 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, but like any

(02:37):
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, how do

(02:59):
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 on the roof of a school bus. You're
probably not gonna shinny up any any elevator shaft cables today,
but there's something comforting about knowing that hatches there. So
I have always kind of wanted to do that. Yeah,

(03:22):
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.

(03:44):
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

(04:06):
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

(04:29):
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
this 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,

(04:51):
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 Manhat and 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 mang god, watch over argue all. But yeah,

(05:15):
that's a great one. 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 did the escape pods in these
movies always have like satin sheets and champagne coolers and

(05:39):
curtains on the windows. 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

(06:01):
a coffin. It's like 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?

(06:22):
Why not just have a door? Well, that's kind of
an obvious question. It's a great question. Um, I think
what 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 or I don't know about we've all, but

(06:42):
I've certainly seen 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. They're using an obvious
set with just in abnormally large fuselage, and they're walking
with relative of ease down the aisle of this airplane

(07:02):
to go jump out 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
imperil 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

(07:23):
the whole dB Cooper story for for some more details
on this. So there's a basic need for an escape
system be a and be at an ejection seat, which
we're not really gonna get into ejection seats much here
that we should mention we're all familiar with ejector seats
right like in top GA, and the ejector seat will
propel you up the pilot out of the failing aircraft.

(07:43):
You deploy a parachute, you get the pilot safely to
the ground, but generally the canopy comes off, though some
there are models of 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

(08:05):
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 member to have an escape plan.
But of course just to boil down, like the basic
economic idea here is that human lines 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. Right know what

(08:28):
means they cost more to train, right right? You need
you need highly trained specialist individuals 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 a sence, 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,

(08:51):
what would you call it if if the pilot being
saved from a failing 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

(09:13):
and describe everything, but you know you're gonna you're gonna
probably want some visuals. So the first one we want
to mention here is the B fifty eight Hustler, the
convert 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

(09:34):
debuted nineteen fifty six, and it was the U. S.
Air force is first operational supersonic bomber. 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, and most

(09:56):
of the images you see of it, so yeah, it
looked like an arrowhead. They'll maybe an arrowhead either you know,
pregnant with death or infected with explosive parasites. However you
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 uh,
the in these straight, completely angular wings cutting through it.

(10:18):
It's cool to look at. Yeah, and I wanna I
mention this real quick quickly here. Uh it sounds like
some people might be thinking, oh, you're graffly enthusiastic about
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 avation history. So

(10:39):
I grew up like with a lot of books about
these airplanes around, and it seems like they were always
documentaries on TV about these aircraft. So I have a
certain fondness for their designs. The back of the BF.
So yeah, sexy looking aircraft, uh, and initially boasted typical
ejection seats, so just blast the individual crew members out
of the imperiled aircraft. But ejection at supersonic speeds proved dangerous,

(11:04):
so Stanley Aircraft Corporation developed a retrofitted ejection capsule and
in the late nineteen sixty two, and this allowed aircrew
to eject safely at twice the speed of sound and
from as high as altitudes of seventy tho feet or
roughly twenty one kilometers. That does not sound like a
condition in which you would want to be ejected naked

(11:26):
out of your right, have your brain ejected naked, or
even in a flight suit and in a chair, right,
So they came up with this capsule. The capsule was
essentially a clam shell hood that closed over the ejection seat,
and it was I found some some gay images on
this and the Getty images a database of some some
work that wented and went into designing this, and it

(11:48):
was apparently referred to as the torture chamber during development
because it I guess because it kind of looks like
an iron maiden. It really does. Yeah, So this capsule
you have the seed. It's like a right ang goal
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

(12:12):
mask that a Cinabyte would wear in one of the
hell raisor sequels, and the Cinabyte would be called like
shutter Face or something. Yeah, it's reminiscent a little bit
too of a roll top 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

(12:32):
supply system that ensured pressurization, and this was but one
of the things was it was far from fully automated,
because I know when you're when you're hearing this or
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 onto ejection, or you could hold off until the

(12:56):
plane made it to a lower altitude that didn't demand
the pressurization. Um. 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. Um. And this is

(13:16):
the thing we should keep in mind throughout the episode.
I mean, ejecting from an aircraft, Uh always comes with risks.
You know, 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 result, is a violent last resort in a in
a in a terrible dangerous situation. Now, additionally, the pilot's

(13:39):
capsule in the hustler contained the control stick and other
necessary controls 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 you know, immediate um, immediately exercides from the craft.

(14:02):
They're kind of a part of the craft in peril.
So 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 have you have a fair amount of testing the
win into any of these extensive testing even uh, you
would have test pilots that are you know, trying them

(14:23):
out in some cases on the ground. Um, they're loading
them onto um, 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 US Air
Force used Himalayan and American black bears to test the
ejection seats. Well, how did I hear you? Right? Yes,

(14:44):
say that again, Himalayan and American black bears. Uh, none
of them were killed during the test. They always 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 ween or and also at altitudes of
forty five thousand feet. So yeah, the bears helped us

(15:08):
out in that regardless. Well, hard to argue that 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,

(15:28):
in short, it was it was a pretty pretty cool
escape capsule. I think. I think it's one 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

(15:49):
of the plane as the plane passes underneath. It's worth
looking up. Yeah, there's also a fabulous periscope films documentary
that's freely available on YouTube now that that shows the
ex actually how it worked, and it had had like
some wonderful animations. They quoted Shakespeare and showed like sort
of a Disney documentary hand paid the leafing through a

(16:10):
book of the works of Shakespeare just impeccably, you know,
nineteen fifties pr project here, So do we know 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

(16:32):
this but the work that's gone into it is pretty
pretty awesome. It's ejection history dot org dot UK 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

(16:57):
all in all, like some some aircraft have better 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 sooner are they able
to save lives in the event of, you know, catastrophe.

(17:17):
In the case of the Hustler, it looked like there's
something like thirty ejections total, with the majority of them
being survivals, so the torture chamber by and large worked,
it would seem too. I don't I don't have to
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

(17:41):
you really have to have an answer to that, you
can go and count them. Um, but yeah, the Hustler
an interesting plane, a great escape capsule. Get in that
centerbyte 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 set D And this was another beautiful delta wing

(18:02):
bomber of the sixties, designed to be a high altitude
mock three bomber. It never actually entered service, so visually
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 airplane, it's uh, it's probably because it has these
two large canards, which active surfaces essentially imagine the So
imagine the airplane is a bird. It has two little

(18:25):
wings right behind its ears. Um, those are just you know,
control surfaces essentially located behind the cockpit. Performance was However,
the really crazy thing about the XP seventy was that
it was designed to fold its wings down during supersonic
flight and ride its own shock wave quote much as

(18:45):
a surfer rides in ocean wave. That's a according to
the NASA DOT Gov fact sheet on this aircraft. 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 it's
like it's very white and very thin, extremely thin as
far as the wings go. Has a paper like kind

(19:07):
of quality to it, except that the the of course,
the middle fuselage is kind of circular, but otherwise it's
it's dead ringer for paper plane. Yeah, it looks it
looks like a paper plane or 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

(19:29):
scrapping it, so it became a research aircraft, 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 sort

(19:52):
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 the early flight provided

(20:12):
data on a number of issues facing 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. There was still
so much to learn at the time about supersonic flight.

(20:36):
But this one did have an injection 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

(20:57):
back and then the clam shell snap over uh. And
it contains survival gear oxygen systems. It also contained the
flight control stick for the pilot and uh, 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. But there is one key incident

(21:21):
that occurred with one of the XP seventies, and that
was the 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 NASA's
F one oh four in Chase plane. How did that happen? Um,
they were essentially, they were they were doing photographs of

(21:46):
the research that was being conducted, and one plane got
too close to the other. And yeah, it was a
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 flight in the XP seventy, was unable to
eject and he died in the crash. North American test

(22:08):
pilot Al White, who had been with the XP seventy
projects since the beginning, he ejected. He said, he ejected,
uh in the capsule, but he received serious injuries in
the process because the clamshell crushed his arm. So his
arm was outside of the the clamshell and it was crushed.
That is something I've read about and these, uh, these

(22:30):
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 going through that A that A that ejection
website that I mentioned earlier, you see this with with

(22:51):
countless ejections. Capsules are not where Sometimes individuals survived, sometimes
they don't. Sometimes they are minor. Sometimes there are severe
injuries that are entailed the course of escaping that aircraft. Okay,
let's look at another one. How about the General Dynamics
F one eleven ard Vark name, yes, the ard Vark,
this one. This one is a great, great aircraft. This

(23:13):
was one was one of always one of my favorites.
So this one was in service seven through for the U. S.
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 part because
I did have a toy version of it. There you go.
If you have that physical manifestation of the thing as

(23:34):
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 fourteen Tomcat.
The of course, you know, the top gun plane for
anyone out there is not not that familiar with with
your jets, variable sweep wings and coolest of all, kandem

(23:57):
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, with multiple crews,
you know you're often talking about the pilot, um a navigator, pilot,

(24:17):
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 like that. But this one had

(24:38):
pilot co pilot pilot sitting right next to each other,
just like a love seat, just like a love seat.
And uh, the cool part here is 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. And it looks something
like a Star Treks shuttlecraft. So we will see this

(25:01):
idea repeated in a few minutes when talking about some
proposals for passenger aircraft. It was so yeah, think of
think of a shuttle craft. It was self righting, it
was water tight, it could be used as a flotation device.
Um so sorry you said self righting. Not that's not
riding with a d but self righting, as in it

(25:21):
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 looks like
there were about over a hundred injections logged for the

(25:41):
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 m f casualties
because you can you can have this great ejection system
in place. But you're still talking again about really dangerous situations, uh,

(26:04):
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 um results on the aircraft.
You wouldn't think so, but yeah, I mean the high
speed bird a high speed plane, uh versus and that

(26:25):
meets a you know, the 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.
You know. It's just like the plane had a malfunction

(26:47):
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 Arc uh and it says, quote capsule was fired
with the airplane about sixty degrees nose down at a
hundred feet or less. Uh So, like the it seems

(27:11):
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
about one more? What about the Rockwell B one a Lancer? Yeah,

(27:34):
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. I think of the current estimates here
the U. S Air Force uh B one Lancer, So
the Air Force had four B one a's built. This

(27:56):
was the first model and h then they ended up
doing a hundred B one be The first three B
one a's 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 Ardvark was present here. But
then the B one a was equipped with a conventional

(28:16):
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
a military aviation standpoint. And apparently it was only used once.

(28:38):
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
were severely injured. So the one use of it again
during its limited roll out, uh was it was very

(29:01):
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. I guess most of the dangers at the ground,
but yeah, but but yeah, it's a dangerous environment. You're

(29:23):
not really supposed to be up there, and the thing
that got you there is not functioning 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 want my money back. No, actually I don't,
because I arrived safely and so you know it's fine.

(29:46):
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 eleven by Tatiana ivan Evna dimon Chuk, who
wrote this patent for quote method for the mass Emergency

(30:10):
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 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

(30:32):
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 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

(30:56):
would sit on some kind of guide track in inside
the airplane fuselage, and when an emergency occurs, the hatches
and the fuselage pop open and the seat containing capsules
would be ejected. According to one diagram, I saw. It
looks like they would sort of blast out of the
bottom of the plane and an angle diagonal to the

(31:16):
plan'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 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

(31:40):
gets dire, each of those train cars may be pooped
out of the airplane. Oh it's a good one, Okay.
So I 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 Nikolayevich Tatarenko,
And there are some YouTube videos demonstrating the concept, complete

(32:04):
with inspiring quotes by Confucius and Einstein and uh so,
the 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

(32:24):
you imagine it. It's like you get into the cabin
of the plane, and that is a detachable section of
the 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

(32:46):
top of the escape capsule, and the cabin comes down
for a soft landing on inflatable cushions. I have to say,
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

(33:09):
there are the other ones that get picked up on
like ain't that cool dot com? Or something. This one's
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

(33:31):
real airplanes. But there's a larger problem here, which is
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

(33:53):
coming off, coming out of the plane and then deploying
parachutes to parachute down to safety, that helps sometimes, but
the vast majority of airplane accidents happened during takeoff, ascent, descent,
and landing when you are nearer to the ground, and
parachute supported capsules are just going to be less likely

(34:13):
to meet a 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 think
back to all these the capsules we discussed so far
in military aviation, these are ejection capsules. These are essentially
fancy ejection seats and versions of the ejection seat, which
of course launches the individual away from the plane generally

(34:35):
upward um And that I mean like, for instance, that
F one eleven example we saw where there is exceedingly
low altitude that 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

(34:56):
fatal commercial aircraft accidents and in the world send while
it was between two thousand and six and twenty and
this 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 accidents and
twenty four percent of onboard fatalities occurred during the cruise

(35:19):
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 the air is the cruise section. Yeah,
this is 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

(35:40):
percent of fatal accidents and fourteen percent of onboard fatalities
occurred during 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 acts it in,
it is more likely to be a fatal one. That's

(36:02):
kind of intuitive, right, since it's twelve percent of the accidents,
but accounting 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 yard of the ground, the more
useless a proposition like these escape pods becomes. Overall, flying

(36:26):
in airplanes is incredibly safe. You 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.
Uh 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 U s. National Safety
Council used its yearly injury statistics. They do this every

(36:50):
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 fifteen 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 are much more likely
to be killed by electriccution that's one in twelve thousand,

(37:13):
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 accident at one
in seven thousand, one hundred and seventy eight. So things

(37:35):
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
likely to help you. UH. The parachutes just probably wouldn't
have time to unfold and decelerate you before you crash

(37:57):
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 payload capacity
increases fuel costs. If you want an airplane with an

(38:18):
escape pod, I think you're gonna 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 one thing I
hadn't thought of that they author of this spoke to

(38:41):
somebody named David aiken whose director of Space systems the
Space Systems 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 the safety system. That
didn't even cross my mind. But of course that's the case, right,

(39:03):
You could have lots because every time you activate an
injector 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 ejection seat or an ejection capsule is

(39:23):
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 have one today because it's just

(39:45):
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 again. It's
it's wonderful. Are there others? Air Force one has an
escape pod? Here's one how about the movie Air Force One?

(40:06):
I never saw it? Is this where is this Harrison
Ford versus uh, Gary Oldman and Gary? Or is it Gary? Okay,
I can't remember. I want to say it's Gary Oldman
has president and 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. They attack him. He says, get
off my plane, and he fights them. And so this

(40:29):
came out in July n 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 and in the movie,
actually the plane has an escape pod. The article speaks
to a White House aid confirms there is no escape
pod in the real Air Force one, but apparently Bill

(40:52):
Clinton wanted one. Well you come in. I think they
were joking, that's what they said. Well, I mean he
come back to the economic model is one of the
cases where it would make sense right to have an
ejection capsule for the most powerful individual in the United States.
But I don't know how much does the president cost um.

(41:13):
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 question. Maybe they're just psyching us out.
I have heard of certain situations with informational websites with
information about Air Force one being asked to, you know,

(41:36):
cut down on the detail. 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 pot alright, Well, on that note, we're gonna
take a break, a quick break for you. We're actually
going to take a break for several days and then
come back in and finish this. So if we sound
a little different, if we sound better, healthier, if we

(41:59):
sound worse, of 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 are going to get into escape pods in space exploration,
both actual and the merely proposed. I'm at, I'm null,
I'm ben, and we are stuff they don't want you

(42:21):
to know. Each week we cover the latest and strangest
in fringe science, government cover ups, allegations at the paranormal,
and more. New episodes come out every Friday on iTunes, Spotify,
Google Play, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. All right,
we're back. So we've been talking about aviation, escape pods,

(42:43):
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 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

(43:04):
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 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

(43:25):
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 something
like that, and then what do you do. You just
drift off into space. Well, there's no I mean, that's
not very useful as far as things go right now,
because we do not have deep rescue vehicles in deep

(43:45):
space operating between planets and star systems. This is one
of the ideas that came up in Pandora, is that
it's 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 up exactly. I mean,
what's the point. But there may be a point if

(44:05):
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 from September nineteen sixty six with an article called

(44:27):
quote Lifeboats in Space, by none other than Dr Verner
von Braun all about the all about the subject of
rescue from orbital vehicles. Vernon von Braun, of course, the
famed former German rocket scientists who came to the US
after the War with I think you mostly stationed out
of Huntsville, Alabama, and uh yeah, contributed a great deal

(44:50):
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 it's the nineteen sixties. What happens if
there's a problem, right, I mean, you have no recourse yet.

(45:13):
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 boat that gets stuck off shore at sea
and starts sinking. If you call for help, then evacuate

(45:35):
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 the ocean, right off the coast. So
you would have to send the orbital equivalent of a

(45:56):
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 helicopter and heading off. That you're dealing
with with massively powerful velocities and great mass, So you

(46:19):
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 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,

(46:42):
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
was using oxygen environments and in its spacecraft. That don't
do that anymore, but yeah, exactly, and it led to

(47:03):
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 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 he gives the

(47:26):
example of an onboard nuclear power source. Wow, that sounds
pretty awful, but anyway, So von Bron concludes that we
need to think about the concept of lifeboats that allow
spacecraft crews to escape 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

(47:47):
article from sixty six. And these illustrations are great, by
the way. So one example that he gives is, uh,
the emergency cocoon, and he says this is under test
by general electric quote shelter. He's shipwrecked spaceman in an
inflated fabric ball. Heat insulated by outer later outer layers
of aluminiumized plastic, thin silicon rubber lining retains oxygen carried

(48:12):
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 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 quote separable shelter, and

(48:36):
this looks more like a huge thermus that everybody gets in. Right.
It also reminds like both of these remind me of
of like toys you can buy it ikea. The first one,
the ball. The second one is like one of these
little tunnels that you get where it's like a like
a fabric tunnel that you stretch out and then children
can crawl through. Yeah. So von Bron says that the
separable shelter. It holds five to fifteen men and can

(48:58):
serve as a life for large space vehicles of the future. Uh,
And it has rocket self propulsion that can boost it
to higher, 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

(49:19):
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 make an escape pod that will get you all
the way home on your own, Well, that's gonna be
a different undertaking altogether, exactly. So it makes no sense
to have a full on re entry capable space ship

(49:39):
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,
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 under standing of this, if

(50:00):
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 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

(50:23):
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 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

(50:44):
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, uh, you will be burning.
So the space historian James Oberg has a good article
about this from two thousand three called The po People
Nice Reference, published in Air and Space Magazine, and he
talks about how in the early days of the space

(51:05):
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 escape pod, but as a research
probe to fly up in space and get pelted by
micro medioroids, essentially to try to figure out, you know,
what's the density of solid objects in Earth, or but

(51:26):
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 did
end up designing inflatable reentry vehicles, uh with with the
designs essentially resembling, as 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

(51:48):
fire and burn up and explode. One of the designs
he mentioned is a modified ro Gallo wing, which is
basically a hang glider, but imagine sort of a hang
glider with struts. It instead of being made of metal,
are a fabric tube that gets inflated with gas to
such a high pressure that it becomes rigid. And so

(52:09):
that's what we're dealing with. But back to von Braun
in ninety 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 from Douglas and essentially it's an

(52:29):
objector seat sort of like you would see in like
a like a fighter 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 drags skirt that deploys for self self stabilizing reentry,

(52:52):
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, you know,
about half the size of your index finger, put it
in a large metal bowl or like a tinfoil boil bowl,
and dropped that bowl through a planetary atmosphere, that would
be what you'd be talking about here. Yeah, So that's

(53:13):
scary enough, But I want to get to the most
epically horrifying space escape capsule concept that I've come across
in the 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,
the acronym moose originally stood for he says, man out

(53:35):
of space easiest, But he's not an actual moose because no, okay,
but because we have had actual bears in a scape
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 and ungulate? I think it is? Yeah, okay, okay, um,

(53:58):
I should know my ungulates better. But no, no, no,
So the name was changed to stand for it, like
they back renemmed it. You know, they said, No, what
actually stands for is manned orbital operations safety equipment, which
is a little tortured. But okay, I mean, you really
don't want to tell an astronaut that he or she
must climb into a device that's got the word easiest

(54:20):
in the title. Yeah. Well, but but I like the
idea of of summoning the idea of the moose for
your entry because the moose is rugged, the moose is tough.
The moose the moose is of you know, a stubborn,
willful creature, much like the astronauts zeal for life. Right,
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

(54:42):
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 Ford nast that
discovered the rich pantheon of say Egyptian deities, so they
go to the are we'll just plunder this, uh, this mythology,

(55:03):
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
with polyurethane foam to assume re entry shape. He uses

(55:23):
retrorocket to de orbit, then discards it. Bag has foldable
heat shield for re entry, and parachute that automatically unferrels
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,
my spacecraft is on fire and my pure oxygen environment

(55:45):
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
folds out to about one point eight meters in diameter.

(56:07):
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
has entombed themselves within a lump of polyurethane. Yeah. Yeah,

(56:29):
it's sort of the breaking 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 re entry,
and then he discards the gas propellant and he uses

(56:51):
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 the atmosphere,
he opens a chest mounted parachute and then comes down

(57:12):
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 six meters
off of a bridge in Massachusetts, and they say that

(57:34):
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 a cocoon,
which is just putting it in such a soothing way.

(57:57):
But then he goes on to point out that while
self rescue device is 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 point because
this is supposedly why the Russians and the say used
vehicle carried a survival pack up up and back to

(58:19):
space containing guns and ammunition. There was at least one
crash where there were there were wolves on the prow.
So 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 barrels
and a folding stock, and they said it also worked
as a shovel and had a swing out machete in it.

(58:40):
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
gun came on the journey and came back just in
the event that it would be helpful, Um, you know,

(59:03):
it says a lot. I'm so glad this never led
to shotgun in machete battles in space on the space station. Well,
you know, I 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
guns in space, but also some proposed ideas that never

(59:23):
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
the in the wilderness. Who might need some survival equipment

(59:44):
of 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
acuronym uh, which is a device that uses an underwater
explosion to allow precise signaling of your location to people

(01:00:05):
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 oh,
the astronaut has a very placid face in this picture
where he's laying in this bed of foam that looks

(01:00:27):
like it's just a blob that's gonna envelop him and
digest him. Yeah, and the and and the 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 ride. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. He's
holding this big wishbone full of fire. But yeah, but

(01:00:49):
this is great. I would love to see this utilized
in um 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 because this usually is like the

(01:01:11):
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 much of a spoiler. Well, I know,

(01:01:31):
I know, one of course is like gravity and oh yeah,
they does 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
of uh, you know, and it's but hey, we're not
going to spoil and say whether the individual survived or not,

(01:01:53):
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 movie was out yet,

(01:02:14):
but when people were asking if I read the book
because it covered a lot of the same stuff we
talked about, it had not then that 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 is in like eighty six centimeter diameter high tech

(01:02:36):
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 maybe 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 into a some kind

(01:02:57):
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 its contemporaries were

(01:03:18):
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 Jimini l s r S. So
you know, obviously no one wanted to wind up stranded
on the Moon, yet the risk of this happening were
rather high during the Apollo Moon missions. As such, NASA

(01:03:39):
designed the Gemini 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 of it all

(01:04:00):
variant aimed at rescuing three 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

(01:04:21):
trio of astronauts. But this was one of this is
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 though, actually being stuck on the surface of
the Moon for thirty days waiting for 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

(01:04:44):
our house, we we 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 the this is a kind of situation where there's
there's only one car, or it's gonna take or it's

(01:05:04):
gonna take a tremendous 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 a sort of
like logistical real life surface world terms, and uh, you know,
some some models work that some just ultimately fall short

(01:05:27):
of capturing the just severe isolation. Uh, Like the closest
thing I guess would be to just uh to just
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

(01:05:48):
you're in the International Space Station and uh, something catastrophic happens.
Maybe there's space shrapnel or more problems with the station's toilets,
and let's just get out of hand. What some of
the ammunition for the so use uh 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 soil us space capsules.

(01:06:11):
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 survive re entry as what as
with the two thousand nine Space Junk scare. It can
also provide just a safe refuge daring of the scare um.
And following the two thousand three Columbia Shuttle disaster, the

(01:06:31):
say us served as the primary means of transport to
and from the I S S. Uh trip took up
to two days and the trip back was a mere
three point five hours. So this is the idea here
with the SOUS 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

(01:06:52):
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. 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 and so use t M A spacecraft. The vehicle
lands on the flat steep of Kazakhstan in Central Asia.

(01:07:15):
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 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.

(01:07:37):
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 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,

(01:07:58):
that's not to say we haven't looked in to other
possibilities more I guess you could say refined possibilities than
just having a 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

(01:08:20):
would have this would have allowed them, you know, more
individuals to U to return from I S S to Earth.
But it was a pretty um, pretty costly program. According
to a Wired magazine article from the time, the program
had cost around five and ten million dollars so far,
and then it was just fifty million shy of completing

(01:08:41):
its flight test when basically under the Georgia W. Bush administration,
UH Space and the 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

(01:09:03):
space is just taking off. It's kind of like with
with aviation. Of course, that's the dangerous that that's that's
when you have this enormous 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

(01:09:27):
we're going more and more into into that launch style,
we're seeing more and more of a return 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 top mounted rocket on the capsule that
in the event of a mishap during takeoff can blast

(01:09:49):
the man capsule clear of the rocket and allow it
to parachute back to the surface. That seems very useful. Yeah,
the sell Us uses this, uh, this technology, and there
are a number of man's face craft 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

(01:10:11):
they're Dragon V two. There's also the the U S
Bowing CST one hundred. UM. There's a there's a quote
here that I found from SpaceX officials, and they said
that it's similar to an ejection 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

(01:10:31):
of as as somewhat practical to do because of this
inherent separation between the spacecraft capsule and the launch vehicle
r itself. This is a natural division because they're going
to be separating anyway at some point during the ascent. Correct. Yeah,
they're there, their 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

(01:10:53):
pods for some stranger scenarios involving natural disasters. Want to
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com slash how stuff Works. So Joe YouTube, you grew
up in like, uh, Middle Tennessee, didn't you? Or you
or you didn't get a lot of tornadoes. In Chattanooga,

(01:11:59):
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,
I mean I haven't grown up in mill Tennessee. We
had we had a lot of tornado scares as well,
and so that that possibility was always in the back

(01:12:20):
of my mind growing up, that you know, the tornado
could come and what can you do? What can you
do against the tornado? It's this titanic force of nature
that's just gonna 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 one direction and then run in the
other and then so that they distract the tornado with
the candy bar. I think that's how that went down.

(01:12:42):
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, flatch the door, and just ride
it out. But it is very important, very important that
your shelter be a high quality shelter, like a building

(01:13:05):
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 you're better off not in the trailer
than in it, because it essentially just turns into a

(01:13:25):
death machine if a tornado comes through and you're inside
a mobile home. Yes, so, I think we've all consumed images,
be they mental images, cinematic or otherwise, of trailers and
mobile homes just sucked up into the sky by deadly twisters,
or certainly trailer parts that have been devastated by actual tornadoes.
But what if you what if you actually had an

(01:13:47):
escape pide for your trailer. Uh now, before you envision
a rocket propelled trailer bathroom that blasts you away from
the crumbling, wind griped trailer as it's you know, sucked
into the sky and at all the debris. Um remember
this as as as the twister sucks the trailer up
into the air, what you want to do is stay

(01:14:07):
firmly fixed to the ground. Sure, I mean that's ultimately
the design of of any escape capsule is getting 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 do escape pods come in? Well, as far
as I know, this does not. This has has not

(01:14:28):
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, It's pretty ingenious. It's essentially a little safe

(01:14:50):
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 position and directly below said internal compartment. So if
you're in your compartment and underneath it there's like a
hole on the floor, an escape capsule dimensioned it to
be received and releasably supported within set internal compartment. And

(01:15:12):
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, so I

(01:15:34):
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 could. You could make that argument, and maybe that's
why this wasn't built. But but the I guess the
the argument here is this way you don't have to
anchor the entire trailer to the ground. You used to
anchor this one little safe room. Okay, Well maybe in fact,

(01:15:57):
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
turned into a bunch of knives flying at you that

(01:16:17):
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 seinfeld 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
not it's not economically feasible to offer the trailer as

(01:16:39):
a fully anchored, fully stormproof 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 warm, little capsule in the house.
But then i'd also the thing is, anyone who's ever
been in a trailer before, and I certainly have you,

(01:17:00):
you don't have a lot of room in there anyway, right,
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 out the closet
because that is my only chance to survival. And so

(01:17:22):
you're frantically trying to move everything out of the board
games we never even played 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 I don't know that
because it's like a it's like a sealed off little

(01:17:42):
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 a skate capsule. Then again, and you wouldn't want
to be flying around inside the shower and bashing your

(01:18:03):
head against the faucet, right, so you'd have to have
like a shower like a padded padding and straps on
the walls. 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 up. We're updating the
patent here. I think we have some great ideas. Okay, well,
I've got another escape pod for a sort of escape

(01:18:26):
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
product that was known as the Noah or Noah's Arc

(01:18:48):
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 tsunami that hit Japan. But basically it looks
like a giant yellow ball with a hatch and a
little port hole window near the top. And the yellow

(01:19:09):
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 a tsunami is coming,
you've got one of these things. I don't know. I

(01:19:29):
guess you would have it sitting out in your backyard
or something. You'd want to have it a place where
you can 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
pole going straight through the center of the sphere. And

(01:19:51):
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 and 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,

(01:20:11):
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
escape 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,

(01:20:33):
you know, nuclear armageddon occurs, there is some sort of
an escape. There is some 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 looking
at these things, I do have to wonder. It's like, Okay,

(01:20:54):
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 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 to be

(01:21:14):
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
just going to be like a big bloody mess inside
unless you pack a nut. Sorry for the horrible image,
but unless you 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 you

(01:21:35):
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. I 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,

(01:21:58):
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

(01:22:19):
harness straps, storage space with sufficient 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 restraint support, uh, watertight marine door

(01:22:44):
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.

(01:23:04):
First of all, ambient music has tremendous soothing qualities. Music
for airports, Brian, you know, that's what we'll get you
through time too, you know. And maybe he would have
he would he would create a custom composition U you know,
music for yeah, but yeah, you'll be able to calm
yourself down. But the other thing is if you pay

(01:23:25):
all 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'd want to go
home and just climb into my survival capsule and maybe
crank some tunes. I'm with you, Yeah, I can see it. Yeah,
it can be your safe place. Okay, are what are

(01:23:46):
my 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 are very grateful
for that that luxury. Many people throughout human history have
not had such luxuries. But do you really want I

(01:24:09):
don't know. 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, when I'm
wondering what this consists of, because it instantly makes me
think of overnight canoe trip, the trips that I've been

(01:24:30):
on where 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

(01:24:52):
the park 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 cape 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

(01:25:12):
and you're 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 plexic glass
kind of situation. I'm wondering about that. But then additional
internal insulation acoustic and thermal. And then finally they've got
color options. I I thought the whole point was we
wanted to be visible, though, Yeah, well it's this red

(01:25:34):
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 eye catching color. You'd

(01:25:55):
go for a racing stripe, yeah, 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 tsunami,
I mean, these are some of the most devastating natural
disasters in all the world and all of world history
and uh and and it can be truly horrifying. And

(01:26:17):
it's one of those things where you think, while there
really is no great escape from this if you don't
have fore warning. Um and so anybody who could design
a viable tsunami survival capsule that people could really use
to survive could be affordable to many. I mean, I
think that would be a worthwhile thing to pursue. So
I don't want to I don't want to just make

(01:26:38):
jokes about what these people are doing. I don't know
that 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 you can't
laugh about pooping in a coffee canister right on the
on the on the escape barge, on the in the

(01:27:00):
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. Yes, alright, So one
more example of an escape capsule to discuss here. So

(01:27:21):
many of the 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

(01:27:41):
they have an escape capsule, like some sort of I
don't 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 little drill the
vehicle that would come up that was kind of like

(01:28:01):
an escape capsule that the foot soldiers would 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, real life deployment of so

(01:28:23):
of one of these systems came 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 three

(01:28:46):
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 called 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

(01:29:09):
these these were updated takes on the torpedo like doll
bush 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

(01:29:33):
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 was 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,

(01:29:55):
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 uh this subterranean environment, if we can get a
shaft down there to you can we can potentially get
you back up, or or if there's an adjacent shaft
when we can somehow get you to that shaft, etcetera.
So this, this Phoenix capsule consisted of again kind of

(01:30:18):
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 to protect against foot rocks that are falling, because

(01:30:39):
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 the way up, that would Yeah. So these were
these were pretty These were pretty amazing devices. Um, and

(01:31:00):
they've I think they were They were making the rounds
for a little bit late, but 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 field. I don't usually
experience strong claustrophobia, but just now contemplating this, I'm overwhelmed.
Well you should. You should definitely check out more about
the story. There was a wonderful I want to say.

(01:31:21):
It was an episode of the Ideas podcast out of
Canada that into it. The I think they 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 the
survivors and and what was going on top side as well.

(01:31:41):
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 Alright, 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. Uh,
what we've possibly left out here, Um, you know, what

(01:32:01):
they 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.
The brain. You get to maybe the brain upper nervous
system is encased in a survival eject capsule. Something bad

(01:32:21):
happens to the body, your brain kind of 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 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,

(01:32:44):
that's fine. So something happens, you just eject the SD card.
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, do'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

(01:33:07):
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 escape pod to
give you the chance to have a second go at
all of life's experiences. Well, we know we've not covered

(01:33:29):
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, oh, 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. We would love to hear about them. And hey,

(01:33:51):
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 at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's we find
links out to our social media accounts, as well as

(01:34:12):
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
and how stuff works dot com for more on this

(01:34:33):
and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works
dot com

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