From the Vault: To The Escape Pod!

the Apes. I want to get off. Yeah. And plus this one published on on on Thanksgiving, which I think a lot of times, you know, it's holiday holiday travels, the pressures of the American holidays. Uh, the call of the escape Pod is often, um, you know, siren like and its power. But we also got to talk about escape from New York and this one. So anytime you get to anytime we get to talk about Escape from New York, it's a good time. Yeah. The Donald pleasant S egg I'm sure comes up. Well. I hope you

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

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

that kill people. This happens all the time. Uh. And so the escape rive, you know, the fight or flight impulse, has been associated in neuroscience with the amygdala and the autonomic nervous system, deep deep, primitive old parts of the brain,

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

the room? Do you do the same thing, Robert? Yeah, well, I would say, like the physical exits, it's almost like a subconscious thing. But I also will kind of have like social exit strategies in mind as well, right right, If this gets uncomfortable for any number of reasons, and I'm not saying like office Christmas parties in particular are uncomfortable, but like any social situation that I'm not like one comfortable with, I'll have that escape hatch in the back

of my mind. You know, that's a really good point because that kind of shows how our obsession with physical escape extends even to our metaphors and our abstract thinking. You know, you're in an awkward social situation, how do I get out? You're in a bad relationship, and you think, how do I find a way out of this? You're not physically finding a way out, but that that's the way your brain goes. It's like the hatch in the top of an elevator or the roof of a school bus.

You're probably not gonna shinny up any any elevator shaft cable today, but there's something comfortable about knowing that hatches there. Though I have always kind of wanted to do that. Yeah, 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. 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 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 um to escape from Air Force one in Escape from

New York. It's also my favorite, yeah, because it's it's so comfy. It's an egg, yeah, and and Pleasants is kind of egg like himself, so and it it's just his perfect egg that he's able to get into an

escape from immediate danger into of course more immediate danger. Right. So, if you haven't seen the movie President US, President Donald Pleasants, which is kind of strange because he has a British accent, he gets his plane, gets captured by terrorists who are going to kill him and they're gonna crash the plane into Manhattan. I believe it was kind of strange. But yeah, so Donald pleasants gets into this big egg and he gets shot out the back of his airplane to safety.

I think he says something to his doomed staff like main, god watch over you all. But yeah, that's a great one. But there are tons of great fictional escape pods there in all kinds of James Bond movies. Always when Raker had a great one that was kind of like a like a sexy um bachelor pad, they're always like that. There's some aquatics escape pods in James Bond movies too. Why do the escape pods in these movies always have like satin sheets and champagne coolers and curtains on the windows.

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

a sexy, sexy coffin. But of course, so we don't have to look entirely to fiction for examples of escape pods, because sometimes we really do build escape capsules of some kind into our technologies, especially our vehicles. Um, but why would you build escape capsules into real vehicles? Why not just have a door? Well, that's kind of an obvious question.

It's a great question. Um. I think one of the main area to look for an answer here is in the room of aviation and a lot of We're gonna go through several examples that are related to aviation or or space exploration because we've all seen like the or I don't know about we've all, but I've certainly seen my fair share, and I know you've seen your fair share of like old serial adventures from the thirties and forties, where you have individuals trying to get off of a

crashing airplane and they're using an obvious set with just in abnormally large fuselage, and they're walking with relative ease down the aisle of this airplane to go jump out of a door out of the the the portal with their parachute. And of course, a crashing airplane or an out of controlled airplane or airplane in peril is not going to be that straightforward a situation generally, right, well, I mean a passenger aircraft also are just not made

to be jumped out of. You can read the whole dB Cooper story for yeah, for some more details on this. So there's a basic need for an escape system be at, and be at an ejection seat, which we're not really going to get into ejection seats much here that we should mention we're all familiar with ejector seats, right, Like in top Gun, the ejector seat will propel you up the pilot out of the failing aircraft. You deploy a parachute,

you get the pilot safely to the ground. But generally the canopy comes off, though some there are models of ejection seats where the canopy did not come off and you just blast through the glass. But today we're talking about escape pods. So when you need this enclosed space, when does that come in? Well, it's gonna come when you need added protection, certainly when you're dealing with higher altitude,

higher speed aircraft. And and of course this is just on top of we we talked about, you know the need for the individual, for the pilot, for the crew member to have an escape plan. But of course, just to boil down, like the basic economic idea here is that human lives are more valuable than machines. Yeah, but not in like a moral sense, because most of these are war machines designed to like drop nuclear payloads on the whole cities. Know what means they cost more to train,

right right? You need you need highly trained specialist individuals who are piloting these aircraft. And even though the aircraft costs millions and millions of dollars if it goes down in flames, at least you can say in since you're saving the brain of the aircraft, you're saving the pilots that fluid exactly. So let's look at some examples from aviation history of these great Uh, what would you call

it if? If the pilot being saved from a failing aircraft is like saving the brain, the escape pod is like the jar that you put the brain in. Yeah,

So let's look at some of these jars. All right, Well, so the first one we're gonna bring up, and we're gonna I'm gonna try and make sure that we have images related to these on the landing page for this episode of Stuff to Blow your mind, Dot com because you're gonna we're gonna try and to describe everything, but you know you're gonna you're gonna probably want some visuals. So the first one we want to mention here is the B fifty eight Hustler, the convey B fifty eight Hustler.

So this was a bomber that saw service nineteen sixty through nineteen seventy. About hundred and sixteen were built. It was a three man crew. This was a U s Air Force US Air Force debuted nineteen fifty six, and it was the US Air force Is first operational supersonic bomber. It was visually notable because it had these awesome delta wings, so it looked like an arrow um and it also had a wasp waist fuselage. It was so thin that

it had to use external bomb pods. Gleaming chrome appearance in most of the images you see of it, so yeah, it looked like an arrowhead, though maybe an arrowhead either pregnant with death or infected with explosive parasites. However you want to frame it. It is a very weird and very sexy looking aircraft. It's got this this tapered fuselage like you're talking about is kind of thin, and the in these straight, completely angular wings cutting through it, it's

cool to look at. Yeah, and I wanna I mention this real quick quickly here if it sounds like if some people might be thinking, oh, you're awfuly enthusiastic about all these awful war machines, Robert, uh, I do have to say that I grew up in a household where my my dad was a big aviation enthusiast, and uh I was really into aviation history, military aviation history. So I grew up like with a lot of books about these airplanes around, and it seems like there were always

documentaries on TV about these aircraft. So I have a certain fondness for their designs. But back to the so yeah, sexually looking aircraft. Uh. It initially boasted typical ejection seats, so just blast the individual crew members out of the

imperiled aircraft. But ejection at supersonic speeds proved dangerous. So Stanley Aircraft Corporation developed a retrofitted ejection capsule and in late nineteen six two and this allowed aircrew to eject safely it twice the speed of sound and from as high as altitudes of seventy feet or roughly twenty one kilometers. That does not sound like a condition in which you would want to be ejected naked out of your right, have your brain ejective naked or even in a flight

suit and in a chair. Right, So they came up with this capsule. The capsule was essentially a clamshell hood that closed over the ejection seat and it was I found some some Gatty images on this, and the Getty images a database, so some some work that went and went into designing this, and it was apparently referred to as the torture chamber during development because it I guess, because it kind of looks like an Iron Maiden. It

really does. Yeah, So this capsule, you have the seat, it's like a right angle kind of thing, which is where the crew member would be I guess, but folded over the top of it, it looks kind of like a It's just this cascading series of metal bands coming down, So it looks like a mask that a cinebyte would where in one of the Hell raisor sequels, and the cinembyte would be called like shutter face or something. Yeah, it's reminiscent a little bit too of of a rolltop desk.

Yeah yeah, yeah, like that, but metal. Yeah, so this this that once it's over you, this thing was air tight, had an independent oxygen supply supply system that ensured pressurization. And this was but one of the things that was it was far from fully automated, because I know, when you're when you're hearing this, you're reading about it, you're imagining like, oh, it shuts over you and then you blast out like you're in a science fiction movie. But

it wasn't. The user still had a number of choices after the clamshell shut. You could continue on to ejection, or you could hold off until the plane made it to a lower altitude that didn't demand the pressurization. UM. The idea here being, you know that is still incredibly dangerous, UM ejecting from the aircraft at high altitudes, even in the capsule. So if the plane is not in just complete peril, then maybe it makes sense to wait just a minute, right um. And this is the thing we

should keep in mind throughout the episode. I mean, ejecting from an aircraft, uh always comes with risks. You know, when you eject from an aircraft to bail out, there is a certain percent chance that you will be killed by the ejection process. That's why it is a last resort, is a violent last resort in a in a in

a terrible dangerous situation. Now, additionally, the pilot's capsule in the Hustler contained the control stick and other necessary controls to pilot the aircraft to that lower altitude, and then communication was maintained capsule to capsule in the airplane. Uh So it's this interesting, Um, I love how these capsules are not immediate um, immediately exercised from the craft. They're kind of a part of the craft in peril. So what kind of test pilot would volunteer to be the

first test subject of the torture chamber. Well, it's interesting and reading about these different tests because the thing you had have you have a fair amount of testing. They went into any of these extensive testing even uh, you would have test pilots that are you know, trying them out in some cases on the ground. Um, they're loading them onto uh, you know, under propelled carts to just

see how they how the impact affects them. And in the case of the hustlers ejection capsules, the U S Air Force used Himalayan and American black bears to test the ejection seats. Well, how did I hear you? Right? Yes, say that again, Himalayan and American black bears. Uh, none of them were killed during the tests. They only suffered broken bones for what it's worth, and they were drugged. But we're talking ejections at speeds of mock one point six, um that's we know, or and also at altitudes of

forty five thousand feet. So yeah, the bears helped us out in that regard. It's well hard to argue that they volunteered, but I'm glad to hear that no bears were killed in the making of this escape pod. Yeah, at least we can say that, right. Um So after injection, the capsule here featured a parachute, of course, as well as shock absorbers and inflatable bladders to turn the thing into a life raft if it fell in the water. Uh So, in short, it was it was a pretty

pretty cool escape capsule. I think. I think it's one of the better like just pure examples of of a of an escape capsule in aviation history. There are actually videos online of the tests of this escape capsule, of it coming up out of the plane. You can see it just rocketing up into the sky and shooting up over the top of the plane as the plane passes underneath.

It's worth looking up. Yeah, there's also a fabulous periscope films documentary that's freely available on YouTube now that that shows you exactly how it worked, and it had had like some wonderful animations. They quoted Shakespeare and showed like sort of a Disney documentary, hand paid but leafing through a book of the works of Shakespeare just impeccably. You know, nineteen five these pr project here, So do we know how often people in the real world ejected from one

of these planes? And how well it worked? This was a real revelation to me. There is a wonderful website, and I say wonderful. It's it's a little long in the tooth now it could it could benefit from redesign, but this but the work that's gone into it is

pretty pretty awesome. It's ejection history dot org dot UK and it's an attempt by the author and contributors to catalog every ejection from from key aircraft and and and and also rank like how how survivable each incident was, So all in all, like some some aircraft have better databases and others on this site, but it's it's a real sobering look at the effectiveness of ejection seats and ejection capsules, uh to determine, like to what center they

able to save live in the event of you know, catastrophe. In the case of the Hustler, it looked like there's something like thirty ejections total, with the majority of them being survivals. So the torture chamber by and large worked, it would seem too. I don't I don't have a have a particular stat on it because the database doesn't really present the information that that. Clearly it's not it's

not a modern spreadsheets sort of format. But certainly if you really have to have an answer to that, you can go and and count them. Um. But yeah, the Hustler an interesting plane, a great escape capsule. Get in that cinebyte head. Okay, let's look at another one. How about the XP seventy Valkyrie. Oh yeah, so this this one's really cool too. So this was a prototype for the B seventy. And this was another beautiful delta wing bomber of the sixties, designed to be a high altitude

mock three bomber. It never actually entered service, so visually it's most striking feature and the one that that if you've looked at aviation pictures in the past, you might go, oh, that air plant, it's uh, it's probably because it has these two large canards which acted control surfaces. Essentially imagine the so imagine the airplane is a bird. It has two little wings right behind its ears. Um, those are just you know, control surfaces essentially located behind the cockpit.

Performance Wise, however, the really crazy thing about the XP seventy was that it was designed to fold its wings down hearing supersonic flight and ride its own shock wave quote much as a surfer rides in ocean wave. That's a according to the NASA dot gov fact sheet on this aircraft. Wow. So if you look at pictures of this aircraft, it also is very visually striking. As you say, I thought this one looks kind of like a paper plane.

It does. Like it's very white and very thin, extremely thin as far as the wings go, has a paper like kind of quality to it, except that the the of course, the middle fuselage is kind of circular, but otherwise it's it's dead ringer for paper plane. Yeah, it looks it looks like a paper plane or a piece of oregony, almost like an oregony crane. Yeah, I see

that too. So this airplane design came about in a time of uncertain future for traditional bombers, and the Kennedy administration ended up scrapping it, so it became a research aircraft, 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 of a prototype concorde. Well it was like that. Well it was totally a bomber, but but it was the right size and it had enough in common with the designs that were being looked at for commercial use that it could be used to explore the possibilities there. So, despite some of the problems, the early flights provided data

on a number of issues acing supersonic transport. These included aircraft noise, operational problems, control system design, uh comparison of winternal predictions with what actually happens during the course of flight, high ALTITA to clear air turbulence, all of these issues. I mean, this was there was still so much to learn at the time about supersonic flight. But this one did have an ejection capsule. Yes, back to the main point.

The reason we're talking about is that it did feature an injection capsule and it had a clam clam shell design similar to that that we discussed in the Hustler. So they're bringing back shutter face, right, Yeah, shutter faces in action that the ideally the chair that you're in the cockpit seat, it kind of like folds back and then the clam shell snaps over. Uh, and it contains survival gear oxygen systems. It also contained the flight control stick for the pilot and um, you know, it's very

much the same idea. We We only had two of these, so it's there's not a lot of ejection data on it. But there is one key incident that occurred with one of the XP seventies, and that was a tragedy involving one of them in nineteen sixty six. June eighth, nineteen sixty six, the second of the two XP seventies crashed following a mid air collision with the NASA's F one

oh four in Chase plane. How did that happen? Um, They were essentially they were they were doing photographs of the research that was being conducted and one plane got too close to the other. And Yeah, it was pretty pretty terrible accident because in the course of this, Joe Walker, the F one oh four in pilot, he died in the accident. Um Carl Cross, who was making his first flight in the XP seventy, was unable to eject and

he died in the crash. North American test pilot Al White, who had been with the XP seventy project since the beginning, he act. He say he ejected in the capsule, but he received serious injuries in the process because the clam shell crushed his arm. So his arm was outside of the clam shell and it was crushed. That is something I've read about and these, uh, these aviation eject capsules, is that they tend to if they close over you,

they have to close with extreme force. Uh, And so you're always at risk of having injury from the actual closing process of the capsule. Yeah, and certainly, you know, going through that A that A that ejection website that I mentioned earlier. You see this with with countless ejections. Capsules are not where Sometimes individuals survive, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are minor, sometimes they are severe injuries that are entailed in the course of escaping that aircraft. Okay,

let's look at another one. How about the General Dynamics F one eleven ard Vark name, yes, the ard Vark, this one. This one is a great, great aircraft. This was one was one of always one of my favorites. So this one was in service seven through for the US Air Force. Of course, five hundred and sixty three were produced, and uh it was. It was always a favorite airplane of mind growing up because in probably in part because I did have a toy version of it.

There you go, if you have that physical manifestation of the thing as a kid, you can't help it be a little more into it. But it was also just like a little bit like a like it was just a weird plane. It stood out from the other jets. It effectively came off like a larger bomber version of the F four Team Tomcat. The of course, you know the top gun plane for anyone out there is not not that familiar with with your jets, variable sweep wings

and coolest of all, kandem seating for the two man crew. Okay, so if you have if you have top gun in mind, of course you're going to imagine front and back seating for the pilot and what the gunner? What are the two people? I don't know my top gun, but yeah,

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

like that. But this one had pilot co pilot pilot setting right next to each other, just like a love seat, just like a love seat. And uh, the cool part here was the crew didn't have ejection seats or an escape pod. Even the entire cabin of the F one eleven ard Vark was an escape capsule, the McDonald escaped capsule, and it looks something like a star treks uh shuttlecraft. Wow. So we will see this idea repeated in a few minutes. So when talking about some proposals for passenger aircraft, it

was so, yeah, think of think of a shuttlecraft. It was self righting, it was water tight, it could be used as a flow tation device. Um. So sorry you said self righting. Not that's not riding with a d but self righting, as in it would bob right side up. Yeah. So it's a pretty cool little capsule. I mean, it was the it was it was the entire crew cabin

really and so so how did it work? Well, if we look to ejection history dot org dot UK, which is the leading source of information on this sort of thing, um, looks like there were about over a hundred injections logged for the F one eleven during the course of its tenure, and the survival rate looks pretty good. But again, it's it's kind of sobering to look at a lot of this data, especially when you can see the pictures of

the pilots that were involved. Sometimes the survivors sometimes um casualties because you can you can have this great ejection system in place, But you're still talking again about really dangerous situations, uh, really parallel situations with a malfunctioning or crashing aircraft. Sometimes it's in a war zone, and we're talking about everything from bird strike that's when an airplane strikes a bird, which can have just cataclysmic uh results

on the aircraft. You wouldn't think so, but yeah, I mean the high speed bird a high speed plane, uh versus and that meets a you know, the canopy of the plane or the engine, So you have a bird strike, crashes, collisions, engine problems. All these things happen in the course of a plane's tenure of it, you know, is actually utilized

over the course of a decade or longer um. And sometimes the sometimes the stories are just like fatally short, you know, it's just like the plane had a malfunction and it crashed and there's no sign that even an ejection was even attempted. It just happened so fast that other times they're pretty remarkable. There's a listing for a in an October seven, nineteen seventy six ejection with the ard Vark uh and it says quote capsule was fired with the airplane about sixty degrees nose down at a

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

this one is this is another beautiful plane. I guess kind of there's kind of an evolution here, and this is the form that we still find in service today. Uh and uh it's it's likely going to remain in service tool around twenty I think of the current estimates. Here. The U. S. Air Force uh B one Lancer, So the Air Force had four B one a's built. This was the first model and uh then they ended up

doing a hundred B one bs. The first three B one as featured an escape capsule that ejected the cockpit with all four crew members inside it, much like we saw with the Ard vark, so just you know that the next evolution of the art, VARK was present here. But then B one A was equipped with a conventional ejectian seat for for each crew member, so they ended up scrapping the the full escape capsule design in favor

of more traditional ejection seats. So that was kind of like the end of the the golden age of the ejection capsule, I guess you would say, at least from a military aviation standpoint. And apparently it was only used once. I mean, you only had what three aircraft that featured it, But there was an August incident escape pod parachutes didn't deploy fully in the module impacted in a right nose a low altitude. One crew member was killed, two others

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

but but yeah, it's a dangerous environment. You're not really supposed to be up there, and the thing that got you there is malfunctioning or crashing. So Joe, I flew a few times this year. Uh where was my injection seat? It's a total bummer, isn't it that you do not get an escape pod in a regular passenger aircraft? I want my money back. No, actually I don't, because I arrived safely and so you know, it's fine. Uh So,

there are a few patents that there. There is a reason that I'm going to get to in a minute why you don't usually see this in passenger aircraft. But first I just want to look at a couple of examples. One is a patent that I found filed January two eleven by Tatiana ivan Ivna dimon Chuk, who wrote this patent for quote method for the mass emergency evacuation of passengers from air transport and aeroplane with equipment for rescuing passengers in an emergency situation. I have to just comment

reading a bunch of patents for this episode. Man, the writing style of most patents is so awful. It as if they're written explicitly to make it hard to picture what they're talking about. Yeah, thank goodness there there are often visuals to go with it, because otherwise it would be very difficult to get the idea from some of the writeups. Yeah, I don't mean to call this one out in particular, but it also the writing wasn't amazing on it. But yeah, that that's sort of across the board.

But anyway, basically what is envisioned in this one is that the airplane would have rows of seats that are enclosable into smaller capsules, and then these capsules would sit on some kind of guide track inside the airplane fuselage, and when an emergency occurs, the hatches and the fuselage pop open and these seat containing capsules would be ejected. According to one diagram I saw, it looks like they would sort of blast out to the bottom of the

plane and an angle diagonal to the plane's movement. But yeah, I have not seen anyone claiming that they're going to make a passenger plane incorporating these designs. Yeah, this particular design it it basically think of there being a tiny train inside the airplane, like little train cars, little subway cars that have your your seats in them right, and then if if, if, if necessary, if the situation gets dire, each of those train cars may be pooped out of

the airplane. Oh it's a good one, okay, So I found another one also that there were some reports about another supposed design for a passenger plane escape system, this one by a Ukrainian engineer named Vladimir Nikolayevitch Tatarenko, and there are some YouTube videos demonstrating the concept, complete with

inspiring quotes by Confucius and Einstein and uh so. The demonstration in the videos shows that under this design, what would happen is that the lower part of the fuselage detaches from the engine and pilot section of the plane,

including the entire passenger cabin and luggage storage. So if you imagine, it's like you get into the cabin of the plane, and that is a detachable section of the plane that attaches to the wings and the pilot's area through through a connector, and so an emergency happens, the cabin of the plane essentially just detaches from the fuselage and comes off. Parachutes extend from containers on the top of the escape capsule, and the cabin comes down for

a soft landing on inflatable cushions. I have to say, I'm I'm a little iffy about this one because I've mostly seen it covered on like viral news type sites. You know about these inventions, Robert. Sometimes you see inventions that are covered in trade press for whatever field the inventions in, and they're covered in mainstream news, and then there are the other ones that get picked up on like ain't that cool dot com? Or something. This one's more of the latter type, and uh, and so I

haven't seen it in serious sources covering aviation technology. What little coverage it has gotten in mainstream press appears to be pretty skeptical of the practicality of the model. So I wouldn't expect to be seeing this implemented in any real airplanes. But there's a larger problem here, which is that even if you could make escape pods on passenger aircraft work, which with enough motivation and investment, I'm sure you probably could, I don't think that any of these

are ever going to become a real thing. One of the first problems is that when you picture the capsules coming off, coming out of the plane and then deploying

parachutes to parachute down to safety. That might help sometimes, but the vast majority of airplane accidents happened during takeoff, ascent, decent and landing, when you are nearer to the ground, and parachute supported capsules are just going to be less likely to me to happy end, we mentioned earlier problems about like trying to deploy a parachute when you're very close to the ground, it doesn't usually work. Right, And think back to all these the capsules we discussed so far.

In military aviation, these are rejection capsules. These are essentially fancy ejection seats, in versions of the ejection seat, which of course launches the individual away from the plane generally upward um. And that I mean like, for instance, that F one eleven example we saw where there is exceedingly low altitude, but the reason they survived is probably because it launched the capsule up far enough for the parachute

to come into play for them. Right. Uh So, I found a twenty sixteen Boeing statistical summary compiling all the fatal commercial aircraft accidents in in the world since while it was between two thousand and six and and this only includes things that you would actually consider accidents, not

things like terrorists, bombs or missile strikes. But during this period, only twelve percent of their fatal accident and two percent of onboard fatalities occurred during the cruise portion of the flight, which is what this is when the plane is that it's regular flying altitude. Most of the time you're in the air, is the cruise section. Yeah, this isn't the part where you can get up, walk around, go to the bathroom, and become increasingly annoyed at the other people

on the plane. Right, so this is going to be the majority of your flight time, but the minority of where accidents occur, the vast minority, About eighteen percent of fatal accidents and fourteen percent of onboard fatalities occurred during takeoff and climb, and about fifty nine percent of fatal accidents and sixty one percent of onboard fatalities happened during

descent and landing. And so one thing you know is from these stats is that if you do happen to be in the rare midflight accident, it is more likely to be a fatal one. That's kind of intuitive, right since it's twelve percent of the accidents, but a kind of percent of the fatalities, but they just happen a lot less often. Most of the bad stuff happens near or on the ground, sometimes that you haven't even left

the ground. You're on the runway when something bad happens. Uh, And the closer y ared of the ground, the more useless a proposition like these escape pods becomes. Overall, flying in airplanes is incredibly safe. I know you've probably heard stats about this before, how it's more dangerous to be in a car than an aircraft by pretty much every measure you can look at. I think this is true. So there are different ways to estimate the difference. But here's one thing I found that puts it in terms

of lifetime risks. So the US National Safety Council used its yearly injury statistics. They do this every year to compile and odds of dying chart, which is a good idea, right. It ranks your lifetime chances of being killed by particular things. So in they claim that your odds of dying in a plane crash are one in ninety six thousand, five

hundred and sixty six. And according to their data, you are much more likely to be killed by electricution that's one in twelve thousand, two hundred, by a b wasp or hornet sting that's one in fifty five thousand or so, or in a motor vehicle crash, which is about one in a hundred and twelve. And I might add that in two thousand and eight, the same organization rated your lifetime chances of dying in a space or air travel accident at one in seven thousand, one seventy eight. So

things seem to be vastly improving. So your odds of dying in an air travel accident are already exceedingly low. And if you are in a fatal plane accident, it's most likely to happen on the runway or at low altitude, where an escape pod attached to parachutes is much less likely to help you. UH. The parachutes just probably wouldn't have time to unfold and decelerate you before you crash into the ground or catch on fire. But of course, another thing to consider is economics. We mentioned at the

beginning the economics of the military considerations. UH. Adding escape pods to passenger planes means building new planes and making them much heavier and bulkier, which decreases passenger pay load capacity increases fuel costs. If you want an airplane with an escape pod, I think you're going to need to be prepared to pay the nine thousand dollars per ticket or whatever it ends up costing. One more thing I

wanted to consider. I found an article in a publication called Defense One, which is from Atlantic Media, called why your plane can't have an escape pod? And this offered one thing I hadn't thought of that The author of this spoke to somebody named David Aiken who's director of Space Systems, the Space System's Laboratory at the University of Maryland, and Aikin said, quote, you have to be careful you don't cause an accident because of an inadvertent actuation of

the safety system. It's an accident that wouldn't happen without the safety system. That didn't even cross my mind. But of course that's the case, right. You could have lots because every time you activate an ejector system, you are increasing your likelihood of death in an ejection incident. And uh, and the chance of you dying in a passenger plane is already so low. It just does not seem like

a good cost benefit trade off. Yeah. I mean, an ejection seat or an ejection capsule is an incredibly dangerous device to have. Um. I believe if you go to a you go to an air show and somebody say flies in a MiG or or some sort of you know, older Now, a non military craft, if it had an ejection seat in its previous life, it probably does not have one today because it's just not the kind of thing that a non military craft should have. One last

thing about passenger planes. All those movies that show Air Force one with an escape pod, the best of course being as we mentioned earlier, Escape from New York. Donald Pleasants gets in the egg and it's it's wonderful. Are there others? Air Force one has an escape pod? Here's one? How about the movie Air Force One? I never saw it? Is this? Where is this Harrison Ford versus uh, Gary Oldman and Gariel Or is it Gary? Okay? I can't remember. I want to say it's Gary Oldman has president? Harrison

Ford is the president. Okay, he's the president. He's on Air Force One. Some terrorists get on his plane. I think they're led by Gary Oldman from what I remember. They attack him. He says, get off my plane and he fights them. And so this came out in July, and I found a Time CNN article from that summer reacting to the movie Air Force One and comparing its Air Force one set to the real Air Force one. Now, in the movie, actually the plane has an escape pod.

The article speaks to a White House aid confirms there is no escape pod in the real Air Force one, but apparently Bill Clinton wanted one. Well you come in. I think they were joking, that's what they said. Well, I mean you come back to the economic model. This is one of the cases where it would make sense right to have an ejection capsule for the most powerful individual in the United States. I don't know how much does the president cost um. I think there are there

are price tag evaluations available now on that topic. But it makes sense that they might have one in that scenario, But apparently they don't. However, would they let us know if there was one? Uh, that's a good quition. Maybe they're just psyching us out. I have heard of certain situations with informational websites with information about Air Force One being asked to, you know, cut down on the detail. Really yeah, wow, interest to the great fun Uh so I don't know. You can you can run with the

conspiracy theories there, maybe there's a secret escape pod. Alright, Well, on that note, we're going to take a break, a quick break for you. We're actually going to take a break for several days, and they come back in and finish this. So if we sound a little different, if we sound better, healthier, if we sound worse, if you sound a little sicker, well it's because a few days past.

But when we come back few days contemplating the torture chamber. Yes, when we come back, though, we were going to get into escape pods in space exploration, both actual and the merely host. All right, we're back. So we've been talking about aviation, escape pods, escape capsules, But what about outer space, Like that's the next most dangerous environment. Like if if the air, if the the upper atmosphere is not dangerous enough, let's go beyond the upper atmosphere, let's go into orbit

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

have designed escape pods for spacecraft. Now, they're kind of different than they are in the movies, because what happens in a movie like oh, I don't know, aliens or something like that, where there there are capsules that you're you're in deep space and you get into a capsule to blast away from a ship that is exploding or infested with aliens or some thing like that, and then what do you do? You just drift off into space.

So well, there's no I mean, that's not very useful as far as things go right now, because we do not have deep rescue vehicles in deep space operating between planets and star systems. This is one of the ideas that came up in Pandora, is that is that everyone would would go mad on the ship and you'd go into your escape pods and you blast off in the escape pods, and then you just die out there because nobody's coming to pick you up exactly. I mean, what's

the point. But there may be a point if you're talking about stuff that stays really close to Earth, which almost all well all of our all of our crewed spacecraft so far have So in the early days of crewed space flight, there were a lot of proposals for various types of escape pods, and I actually found I

couldn't believe this. I found an issue of Popular Science from September nineteen sixty six with an article called quote lifeboats in Space by none other than Dr Werner von Braun, all about the all about the subject of rescue from orbital vehicles. Vernon von Broun, of course, the famed former German rocket scientists who came to the US after the war with I think you've mostly stationed out of Huntsville, Alabama,

and uh yeah, contributed a great deal to our space program. Yeah, so von Braun says, so far, and this is nineteen sixty six. Remember, space missions have been very safe. But we're gonna have to expect that at some point a crewed spacecraft will signal distress. What then, I mean, imagine it's the nineteen sixties. What happens if there's a problem, right, I mean, you have no recourse yet. So what he's

proposing is we need a space rescue program. So he says, imagine a crew is stuck in a spacecraft in lower th orbit caused by a malfunctioning retro rocket. Von Braun essentially compares this to the situation of like a fishing boat that gets stuck off shore at sea and starts sinking. If you call for help and evacuate the crew into a lifeboat, you can probably be saved. But we need

to develop the equivalent structures for rescue within space. You need to develop lifeboats and rescue vehicles for space and orbital flight the same way you'd have them for for the ocean, right off the coast. So you would have to send the orbital equivalent of a coastguard cutter essentially to rescue a spacecraft in trouble. But that's difficult because you have to wait for an appropriate launch window to

allow a rendezvous between the two ships. As we know from rocket launches, you can't just fly up there, you know what I mean. It's not like getting in a helicopter and heading off. That you're dealing with with massively powerful velocities and great mass, so you essentially have to aim your gun the right way to start with. Yeah, it's an enormous undertaking. Yeah, and so, so you've got

to get this rendezvous between the two ships. And if the ship in distress is suffering a real emergency, it might be too long for them to wait for somebody on Earth to line up the trajectory of the launch and wait for the correct launch window. Um so uh. For example, a substantial number of spacecraft and emergencies we just know are going to demand immediate rescue. They're going to be very urgent. For example of von Braun. It gives the example of fire. This was back when NASA

was using oxygen environments and in its spacecraft. That don't do that anymore. Yeah, exactly, and it led to disasters in the history of the space program. Or another thing might be penetration of the spacecraft by a heavy, heavy meteoroid. You know, you get pelted with something, it breaks through

the hull. You've got to escape immediately. You can't wait for rescue vehicle obviously, can collision with another spacecraft would be a problem, or toxic fumes in the cabin or maybe radiation contamination from He gives the example of an onboard nuclear power source. Wow, that sounds pretty awful, but anyway, So von Broun concludes that we need to think about the concept of lifeboats that allow spacecraft crews to escape immediately on their own terms. So he's what he's proposing

is escape pods. And so I'm going to mention a few that are illustrated alongside this article from sixty six. And these illustrations are great, by the way. So one example that he gives is the emergency cocoon, and he says, this is under test by General Electric quote shelters shipwrecked spaceman in an inflated fabric ball, heat insulated by outer later outer layers of aluminiumized plastic thin silicon rubber lining retains oxygen carried for breathing, but let's unwanted carbon dioxide

and water vapor escape. So they're putting you in a beach ball. Yeah, it's like a survival bubble kind of the situation. You climb into a beach ball, you blast off from your ship, and you just float around in orbit in your beach ball until the rescue vehicle can come up and get to you, you know, when you can't remain in your ship. The other one would be the separable shelter and This looks more like a huge

thermus that everybody gets in. Right. It also reminds like both of these remind me of like toys you can buy it ikea. The first one of ball. This second one is like one of these little tunnels that you get. Who It's like a like a fabric tunnel that you stretch out and then children can crawl through. Yeah. So von Brand says that the separable shelter it holds five to fifteen men and can serve as a life raft

for large space vehicles of the future. Uh, And it has rocket self propulsion that can boost it to higher, longer lived orbit that allows more time for rescue. So these are more like the sort of roomy escape shuttles of sci fi movies. But they still require ultimate rendezvous with the rescue vehicle that's going to gather the crew and return to Earth under its own specifications. Right, These things are not going to re enter the Earth's atmosphere

in their current form. Right. What if you want to make an escape pod that will get you all the way home on your own, Well, that's gonna be a different undertake altogether, exactly. So it makes no sense to have a full on re entry capable space ship inside your regular spaceship, at least on the scale that we

create spaceships right now. Because spacecraft were then and are still now totally optimized for weight and volume like that, they tend to be very small, pack tight, and to have as light as possible a design to make launch economically feasible. For really crude understanding of this, if you've never thought about it before, just look at the size of the orbiter vehicle itself compared to the size of the rockets used to get it in orbit with any

given launch. It's hilarious. There's usually there's way more fuel than there is spaceship um, and so it's not feasible to make a spaceship within your spaceship to get you home. So how could you make a self contained re entry vehicle that would be very light and fit in storage on the already cramped crew vehicles of the nineteen sixties. Well, some geniuses in space design and aeronautics in the nineteen sixties had a solution to this, and it was inflatable options.

So we already mentioned the beach ball floating in space, but this would be the beach ball that you re enter the burning atmosphere through or I guess the atmosphere is not burning, but once you're re entering the atmosphere

high velocity, you will be burning. So the space historian James Oberg has a good article about this from two thousand three called the Pod People Nice Reference, published in Air and Space magazine, and he talks about how in the early days of the space program, researchers were experimenting with inflatable re entry vehicles called things like the inflatable

micro meteoroid paraglider. And this wasn't originally meant as an escape pod, but as a research probe to fly up in space and get pelted by micro medieroids, essentially to try to figure out, you know, what's the density of solid objects in Earth or but if you go up in space, how often can you expect to get hit

by hard stuff? And so there were research vehicles like this, but they also actually it end up designing inflatable re entry vehicles, uh with with the designs essentially resembling as I already said, paragliders, but they would have a heat shield of some kind so that when you re enter the atmosphere you don't catch on fire and burn up

and explode. One of the designs he mentions is a modified rog Gallo wing, which is basically a hang glider, but imagine sort of a hang glider with struts that, instead of being made of metal, are a fabric tube that gets inflated with gas to such a high pressure that it becomes rigid. And so that's what we're dealing with. But back to von Braun in nine in the nineteen sixty six because he's going to point out, uh, some of these crazy personal reentry vehicles that were under development

at the time he was writing. The first is the space parachute, which he says is a is a concept from Douglas and essentially it's an ejector seat sort of like you would see in like a like a five or jet, you know, if you have to eject, so you're in your seat, and then you've got a retro rocket that you used to orient yourself to de orbit to come down back into the atmosphere. Um. And then you've got this what what he calls a conical drag skirt that deploys for self stabilizing reentry, so sort of

like a bowl extends around the seat. Yeah, if you were to take like a very small baby doll, like one about the size of you know, uh, you know, about half the size of your index finger, put it in a large metal bowl or like a tinfoil boil bowl, and drop that bowl through a planetary atmosphere. That would be what you'd be talking about here. Yeah, so that's scary enough. But I want to get to the most epically horrifying space escape capsule concept that I've come across

in the in research for this episode. And so this thing was called moose and it was developed by General Electric in the nineteen sixties. And according to James Oberg again, the acronym moose originally stood for He says, man out of Space Easiest is not an actual moose because no, okay, but because we have had actual bears in escape pops capsules already in this episode. Thank you for reminding me, Robert. But no, they did as far as I know, they did not test it on any ungulates. Is a moose

and ungulate I think it is? Yeah, okay, okay, um, I should know my ungulates. But but no, no, no, So the name was changed to stand for it like they back renimmed it. You know they said, No, what actually stands for is manned orbital operations safety equipment, which is a little tortured. But okay, yeah, I mean you really don't want to tell an astronaut that he or she must climb into a device that's got the word

easiest in the title. Yeah. Well, but but I like the idea of summoning the idea of the Moose for your entry, because the Moose is rugged, the Moose is tough, the moose, the moose is a you know, a stubborn, willful creature, much like the astronauts. Uh zeal for life. Right, so uh, and I do want to warn you you should look up the Moose to get some some of

the illustrations of this thing. But also you might have some trouble if you're if you're trying to look it up, because there is another NASA project called Moose that stands for something totally different and appears to me to be a completely different thing. So space program really as Moose is coming out both this is a fort NASA discovered the rich pantheon of say Egyptian deities. Why we'll just start we'll just plunder this, uh, this mythology and then

we don't have two things called moose. But okay, here's the whole nightmare, as described by by von Bronze article. So it says, quote self rescue moose a general electric idea in cases, astronaut in a plastic bag that fills with polyurethane foam to assume re entry shape. He uses retrorocket to de orbit, then discards it. Bag has foldable heat shield for re entry and parachute that automatically inferls itself for landing. So if you're having trouble picturing that,

let me try to narrativise this a little bit. So here's the way it works. Major Tom realizes, oh no, my spacecraft is on fire and my pure oxygen environment is raging out of control. Why did we do this? Well, no time for recriminations. I must climb into the escape pod. But really, the escape pod is a plastic bag with

a foldable sheet of elastomeric ablative heat shielding material. And so he folds this thing out and the heat shield folds out to about one point eight meters in diameter, and then uh with him, He's got a canister of polyurethane. So he gets into the folded heat shield and he pulls a rip chord and this opens up the canister of polyurethane, which which fills it up, fills up the shield with polyurethane foam. So at this point the astronaut

has entombed themselves within a lump of polyurethane. Yeah. Yeah, it's sort of the break and bake style of escape pod creation. It's on the fly. Uh. So then you're out of the ship and Major Tom's floating in space in this bag on a bed of foam, and Major Tom fires a small canister of gas propellant to orient himself with the heat shield facing the proper direction for re entry, and then he discards the gas propellant and he uses a hand operated solid rocket engine to enter

the atmosphere. So Tom Tom's in a bag on some foam, rocketing himself back to Earth by hand. There's a fabulous mcgever kind of yeah. So, once in free fall in the atmosphere, he opens a chest mounted parachute and then

comes down to the surface for a landing. And according to the Encyclopedia Astronautica, General Electric, General Electric conducted a bunch of tests and showed that the basic design of moose worked, and they eventually tested it out on a falling scenario by dropping a test pilot in a moose six meters off of a bridge in Massachusetts, and they say that the test pilot survived the impact. Congratulations falling

off a bridge in this thing. But anyway, Von Braun writes of this and quote the space parachute that both fold up for storage and a spacecraft both combine the characteristics of a life raft, a space suit, overcoat and a cocoon, which is just putting it in such a soothing way. But then he goes on to point out that while self rescue devices like these they will get you back down to Earth, maybe not every time, but you know, at least in theory they work, but they

won't guarantee that you will survive once you land. I like that he points that out. This is a good point because this is supposedly why the Russians and the say used vehicle carried a survival pack up up and back to space containing guns and ammunition. There was at least one crash where there were there were wolves on the prow. Yeah, this gun, if you ever get a

chance to read about it, is pretty interesting. So this, the say used survival packet had a gun with three barrels and a folding stock, and they said it also worked as a shovel and had a swing out machete in it. And then it also fired three types of ammunition, which was rifle bullets, flares, and shotgun shells, which that sounds like a gun you'd have in a video game. Yeah. And again it's important to stress just the immense cost

of taking anything into orbit. So the fact that this gun came on the journey and came back just in the event that it would be helpful, Um, you know, it says a lot. I'm so glad this never led to shotgun and machete battles in space on the space station. Well, you know, I actually would love to do an episode, maybe a short episode, on this very topic, because there's some wonderful material out there about actual, uh incidents of guns in space, but also some proposed ideas that never

really took off. UH guns in space. Wow, that sounds like such a horrible idea, But but then again, I don't think this is stupid because, like we said, you can understand if you land way off course in the wilderness, it probably helps to have some survival equipment. Yeah, indeed, I mean, yeah, these things are gonna come down in

the in the wilderness. Who might need some survival equipment. Uh. And the moose actually came with some gear oriented towards on the ground survival as well, So it had a survival kit, food and water, plus things to help the astronaut be found. So it had a thing called us so far bomb that's so far as an acurnym, which is a device that uses an underwater explosion to allow precise signaling of your location to people who are listening

for underwater sounds. It also had radar chaff and some flares and that The Popular Science article has this awesome illustration of the moose that Robert, I think you enjoyed it as much as I did. But the astronaut has a very placid face in this picture where he's laying in this bed of foam that looks like it's just a blob that's gonna envelop him and digest him. Yeah, and the um and and the rockets that he's going

to use to maneuver. It has the look kind of like a cross between a Hoover vacuum and like a divining rod. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, he's holding this big wishbone full of fire. But yeah, but this is great. I would love to see this utilized in some sort of an action sequence, you know, the sort of do it yourself re entry where our action hero just has to grab these two canisters, jump out of the of the spacecraft and just make their way back down to

the here. Well, there are some great scenes in movies. I don't want to spoil anything about movies that exist because this usually is like the very end of the sci fi movie. But they involved things like this, like basically outside of vehicle maneuvering. That's very scary when you think about it. I mean, to be lost in space without any means of propulsion and safe reentry is is just a death sentence. Can we name any of those movies or it would be it would just be too

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

big deal. It's one thing to initiate re entry. It's another thing to actually make it all the way to the Earth surface again and still be alive. Oh and I guess that does give away that I did finally see The Martian. People were asking after we did that how to Die on Mars episode, people were like, hey, have you read The Martian? I don't know if the movie was out yet, but when people were asking if I read the book because it covered a lot of the same stuff we talked about. Yeah, it had not then,

but I have now. In keeping with that beach ball design we had we talked about earlier, there's actually a pre Challenger Shuttle era idea for a personal rescue enclosure or pre rescue ball. This was in like eight success centimeter diameter high tech beach ball for transport of astronauts from space from from a spacecraft in distress to the space shuttle. Uh So crew members would climb into the ball, they'd assume a fetal position and they'd be zipped inside

by a space suited crew member. Huh, so this is this is like what we were talking about towards the beginning of of Von Bronze article, where you you'd get into a some kind of survival capsule and just wait for rescue. Yeah and uh and again this was a pre Challenger project from a time during which Shuttle crews wore no space suits on board the Shuttle afterwards. Afterwards, however, they wore pressure suits during liftoff. Again. Yeah, well that

seems like a smart idea. But okay, So Moose and its contemporaries were basically shelved, but other space escape pod concepts came to the four and some of them were actually realized. Yeah. Yeah. For instance, there's the Jim and I l s r S. So you know, obviously no one wanted to go wind up stranded on the Moon, yet the risk of this happening were rather high during

the Apollo Moon missions. As such, NASA designed the Gemini Lunar Surface Rescue Spacecraft l s r S. And the idea here is that in the event of the crew wound up stranded on the Moon, NASA could send this unmanned craft to their landing site that would be a thirty day trip, and then the two crew members could then board the craft to make a direct return to Earth.

NASA also developed an orbital variant aimed at rescuing three individuals marooned in lunar orbit, as well as a lunar surface survival survival shelter model aimed at giving astronauts on the surface a little more time to await like a full blown, uh, you know, manned rescue, and they eventually planned to produce a universal lunar rescue vehicle to perform all three tasks for a trio of astronauts. But this was one of this one of those sort of later

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

currently have two cars, new car and old car. And if I go, if I drive to the grocery store, if the car breaks down, a I can walk back from the grocery store, or my wife can come and pick me up in the car in the other car,

or something to that effect. You know. But this is a kind of situation where there's there's only one car, or it's gonna take or it's gonna take a tremendous amount of effort to get a second car available, and then to gas it up and send it on its journey to pick you up at this impossible store and you're driving to the middle of the desert in Arizona. Yeah, yeah,

it's um yeah. So I kept trying to put it in in sort of like logistical, real life surface world terms, and uh, you know, some some models work, but some just ultimately fall short of capturing the just severe isolation. Like the closest thing I guess would be to just to set out to the middle of the Arctic Ocean, you know. Uh. Well, hey, so I've got a question. Yeah,

what happens if you have to escape the International Space Station? Well, luckily there there is a way, so um yeah, So let's say are in the International Space Station and uh, something catastrophic happens, maybe there's space shrapnel or more problems with the station's toilets, and those just get out of hand. What some of the ammunition for the soy Use survival kit just explodes, yeah, or you know, maybe just run

out of vodka. Whatever to the dilemma. There is an escape craft on a hand, and it's one of those Russian so use the space capsules. So we first flew one to the I S. S in two thousand and it's been it's been a fixture ever since. It can survive re entry as what as with the two thousand nine Space Junks scare, it can also provide just a

safe refuge daring of the scare um. And following the two thousand three Columbia Shuttle disaster, the soy Use served as the primary means of transport to and from the I S. S U. The trip took up to two days, and the trip back was a mere three point five hours. So this is the idea here with the so us is that it's kind of like, all right, I'm terrified of my car breaking down on my way to the store.

Why don't I just keep a car at the store, ye, permanently, and then I can always drive that pack if something goes wrong. Um, that's kind of the the idea here. So the only thing is that up to so only up to three crew members can return to Earth from the I S S a board of so US t M A spacecraft. The vehicle lands on the flat steep of Kazakhstan in Central Asia. There again, the return takes

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

I mean, you can't clown card this thing. You can't just pack a bunch of people in there and have them sort of hold on to the sides of the capsule. You mean, you have to there has you have to strap yourself in there. There's their oxygen logistics in place, so three people are less no more. Now, that's not to say we haven't looked into other possibilities. More I guess you could say refined possibilities than just having a three person spaceship on hand up there. Um. At one

point NASA was looking into the X thirty eight. This was the I S S Crew return vehicle, and this is a really cool design. It basically looked like a mini like stubby Space Shuttle, UM and and this would have this would have allowed them, you know, more individuals to return from I S S to Earth. But it was a pretty pre costly program. According to a Wired magazine article from the time, the program had cost around five million dollars so far, and then it was just

fifty million shy of completing its flight test. When basically under the Georgia W. Bush administration, UH space and the and re visiting the Moon became devalued as an objective, so the X thirty eight went away as a possibility. Now. It's also worth noting that one of the more dangerous things about rocket propulsion into space is just taking off. It's kind of like with with aviation. Of course, that's

the dangerous stent. That's that's when you have this enormous explosion strapped to the bottom of the craft propelling you up out of the atmosphere. So as as has become important in the past, having a means of ejecting the capsule from the top of that massive explosive rocket is often highly advisable. And as we're going more and more into into that launch style, we're seeing more and more of a earned to that UM. So in a way, we're going back to technology that we used with Mercury

and Apollo spacecraft. We see this in the form of a basic launch escape system. So you have a talk mounted rocket on the capsule that in the event of a mishap during takeoff, can blast the man capsule clear of the rocket and allow it to parachute back to the surface. That seems very useful. Yeah, the sell Us uses this, UH, this technology, and there are a number of man spacecraft that are currently in development, UH, several of which are capsule based and you know would also

employ this. So we're talking about like UH, NASA's Ryan Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle SpaceX. UH they're Dragon V two. There's also the the U S Bowing CST one hundred. UM. There's a there's a quote here that I found from SpaceX officials and they said it's similar to an injection seat for a fighter pilot, but instead of ejecting the pilot out of the spacecraft, the entire spacecraft is ejected

away from the launch vehicle. And that is something that I guess you can think of as as somewhat practical to do cause of this inherent separation between the spacecraft capsule and the launch vehicle itself. This is a natural division, because they're going to be separating anyway at some point during the ascent. Correct, Yeah, they're they're they're separate entities anyway. Yeah, all right, we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we are going to look at a

few more escape pods for some stranger scenarios involving natural disasters. So, Joe, you grew up in like Middle Tennessee, didn't you? Or you or not? A lot of tornadoes in Chattanooga. We got tornadoes. Yeah, we actually tornadoes have been right through my parents neighborhood before, like right through the backyard. Okay, I wasn't there at the time, but it's it's definitely it can be scary when they whip through. Yeah. Indeed, I mean I I haven't grown up in Middle Tennessee.

We had we had a lot of tornado scares as well, and so that that possibility was always in the back of my mind growing up. You know, the tornado could common. What can you do? What can you do against the tornado? It this titanic force of nature that's just going to destroy everything in its path. Let's see, can we look to movies for inspiration? What do they do in that movie Twister? I believe they throw a candy bar in one direction and then run in the other, and then

so that they distract the tornado with the candy blocks. Right, I think that's how that went down. Uh No, generally in uh in tornado movies and in tornado reality, like, all you can do is find shelter. Right, if you have a if you have a storm shelter, if you have a a fortified storm basement, Um, you can run in there, blatch the door, and just ride it out. But it is very important, very important that your shelter be a high quality shelter, like a building with a foundation.

Uh not necessarily something like a trailer. In fact, I have often heard the advice given to people who are living in mobile homes and trailers, anything that's not solidly anchored to the ground or built on a foundation that you're better off not in the trailer than in it, because it essentially just turns into a death machine if

a tornado comes through and you're inside a mobile home. Yeah, so I think we've all consumed images'd be they mental images, cinematic or otherwise, of trailers and mobile homes just sucked up into the sky by deadly twisters, or certainly trailer parks that have been devastated by actual tornadoes. But what have you what have you actually had an escape pode

for your trailer? Uh? Now, before you envision a rocket propelled trailer bathroom that blasts you away from the crumbling, wind gripped trailer as it's you know, sucked into the sky amid all the debris. Um, remember this as as as a twister sucks the trailer up into the air, what you want to do is stay firmly fixed to the ground. Sure, I mean that's ultimately the design of any escape capsule is getting me back to the surface

of the earth. But in this case, you're already on the surface, so you just need to remain there at all costs. So I'm following you so far, So where do escape pods come in. Well, as far as I know, this does not. This has has not been built yet. Maybe some individuals have have taken it upon themselves to build it. I hope so, and if they did, I would love to see the photos. But no, we're going to talk about We're going into the wildest corners of

the patent internet. Yeah, particularly a patent for a tornado escope escape capsule for trailer homes. Yeah, it's it is. It's pretty ingenious. It's essentially a little safe room in your trailer, anchored to the ground, and it consists of the following. This is from the patent. First, an opening formed in the floor of the house trailer and positioned directly below said internal compartment, So if you're in your compartment and underneath it there's like a hole in the floor.

An escape capsule dimensioned to be received and releasably supported within set internal compartment. And then you have a ground engaging anchor position beneath set internal compartment in the house trailer, and then a tether that's connected between the escape capsule and the grounding anchor. So it's it is like this fancy little capsule in your trailer. There's a hole in the trailer underneath it, and it's anchored to the ground firmly. Okay,

so I said, this is kind of ingenious. But I mean, if you're gonna go to the trouble to build this thing, why not just anchor your trailer to the ground. Well, yeah, you can. You can make that argument, and maybe that's why this wasn't built. But but the I guess the the the argument here is this way, you don't have to anchor the entire trailer to the ground. You just anchor this one little safe him. Okay, well maybe in fact,

I don't know. I mean, I I assume most of the danger of being in a trailer or a mobile home when a tornado comes through comes from the fact that it's not anchored and can be tossed around. But maybe there is additional danger, uh, from being in the trailer, Like if the if essentially, if the building materials are not sturdy enough, does it does it get shredded and turned into a bunch of knives flying at you that were formerly the walls and ceiling. Yeah, I don't know,

but but maybe maybe this would avert that. Yeah, and you know, and I guess also it's It's kind of comes back to that old Seinfeldt about why don't they just make the airplane out of whatever they made the black box out of? Right? Like some maybe it's just not it's not economically feasible to offer the trailer as

a fully anchored, fully storm proof living option. But but what it Probably they probably don't do that because the airplane couldn't get off the ground, right, But but what if you could just have this one little capsule in the house. But then I'd also that The thing is, anyone who's ever been in a trailer before, and I certainly have you, you don't have a lot of room

in there anyway. So the other thing is, how do you sacrifice the room for this compartment unless you end up utilizing it for something else, like I guess you have to. You could use it as a closet, But then I can well imagine the scenario where someone looks out the window or they turn on the radio, Oh my goodness, there's a twister coming. I've got to clean out the closet because that is my only chance to survive evil. And so you're frantically trying to move everything

out of the board. Games. We never even play these, yeah, or you know, because other options, what you could have it be the bathroom. How would that work to have your your bathroom be the escape capsule? The showers? What I was thinking. You get into the shower and it's like a I don't know why the shower I guess I don't know, because it's like a it's like a

sealed off little box in a certain way. Yeah, Like, okay, I could see that working, and and you would You would probably not fill the shower up with just a bunch of junk in the meantime, and the fact that you would use the shower would make it remain an open option for escape capsule. Right. Then again, you wouldn't want to be flying around inside the shower and bashing your head against the faucet, right, So you'd have to have like a shower like at padding and straps on

the walls, strap yourself in man a padded shower. They'll probably get a little mildewy, wouldn't it if the material was right? I don't know. I think we're updating the patent here. I think we have some great ideas. Uh okay, well, I've got another escape pod for a sort of escape pod for natural disasters, and these are tsunami survival capsules.

There are multiple designs have come across for this. Yes, it sounds crazy, but I could find evidence of at least a couple of real companies that have created and manufactured tsunami escape pod. So the first one is a product that was known as the Noah or Noah's Arc and it was created by a Japanese company called Cosmo Power almost ten years ago. I got some press in two thousand eleven, I assume related to the March two

thousand eleven earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. But basically it looks like a giant yellow ball with a hatch and a little porthole window near the top. And the yellow color is strategic because it hopefully makes the escape capsule easier for rescuers to find once the devastation is over. Uh And the structure is made of enhanced fiberglass and the company claims it is strong enough to withstand earthquakes, hurricanes,

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

pole going straight through the center of the sphere. And I guess that is to cling to while you're hoping this thing works. But anyway, according to an ABC News report, the shelters were selling for about four thousand dollars apiece in two thousand eleven. I don't know if this company still exists in any form, or if these things are still made, or if anybody has ever used one successfully, But there is one product. I'd make of it what you will the product, and they would. That's the thing too,

there selling the product. They're selling the idea of the skate a capsule more than anything, much like you know, much like a storm shelter or a bomb shelter. It's the idea that there is an escape. It's an idea that if the tsunami occurs, if the tornado occurs, if yeah, you know, nuclear armageddon occurs, there is some sort of an escape, There is some so there's an escape capsule for this scenario that my my primitive parts of my

brain can can feel good about. Yeah. Obviously I claim no expertise in how to survive high energy events, but I looking at these things, I do have to wonder. It's like, okay, so they float, that's good. You're you're not gonna get trapped underwater hopefully, you know, so you're in this thing, you'll float up to the top eventually and be rescued. But also, you know, a tsunami is an incredibly high energy event, and so it's gonna have

you bashing around at things. Now they can probably I guess, pad the inside of this thing, but you're also going to be in there with other people, and there's this metal pole for you to hold onto. I just wonder if when you open this thing up at the end, is it is going to be like a big bloody

mess inside unless you pack enough. Sorry for the horrible image, but unless you do, you do go complete clown car in this and you just make sure that you fill it up completely, and then some individuals survives, some don't. It's kind of like there's like not enough room for you to knock around. Yeah, yeah, you kind of. You do, like the different species of ants that make barges out

of themselves, you know. Well, anyway, there is another tsunami survival capsule that came across a similar device created by aircraft engineers Julian Sharp and Scott Hill. And this one it's got its own website. And instead of being yellow, 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 harness straps, storage space with efficient for they say sufficient for five days, supply per person, supply of what I'm not quite sure, water storage, internal light, GPS, air ventilation vents uh that they say it's high visibility unit, color, air supply tanks, hard restraints support uh, watertight marine door and a marine standard window, little porthole. But then this

was the thing that got me. They said, Okay, so all that stuff Okay, you can see why you'd have all those things. But they've also got optional features they advertise, including surround sound music system. This would be a must, I think, And I've got to to two reasons here. Okay. First of all, ambient music has a tremendous soothing qualities. Music for airports, bran, you know, and that's what will

get you through, you know. And maybe he would have he would he would create a custom composition, you know, music for yeah, but yeah, you'll be able to calm yourself down. But the other thing is, if you pay you know, I'm guessing a fairly ridiculous sum for this upscale survival capsule, you might want to spend some time in it, like I would want to. I would if I had a stressful day. I don't want to go home and just climb into my survival capsule and maybe

crank some tunes. I'm with you, I can see it. Yeah, it can be your safe place. Okay, what are my other options? I'm already on board for the music. You can pay up for dry powder, seat toilet, Okay. So I don't know, because on one hand, we we all who have access to modern plumbing or very grateful for that that luxury. Many people throughout human history have not had such luxuries. But do you really want I don't know.

I mean, on one hand, I guess it might be better than the alternative, But I'm just thinking about the idea of human waste slashing around in a survival capsule. I mean, I guess maybe it's going to be coming out either way, and it's just a question do you

have a toilet or not? Yeah, And I'm wondering what this consists of, because it instantly makes me think of overnight canoe trip, the trips that I've been on where you were required by the park to have a toilet option on the canoe, and what what we had was, and instance, it's kind of an escape capsule. It was a folder's coffee can with kitty letter in it. In the event that you needed to use the restroom in there, you certainly could. It would not be fun, but it

could be done. And just having it there, you know, made you feel a little easier and made the park rangers feel a little easier. I guess. So maybe it's all psychological, Yeah, I think, I mean, that's that's a large part of any escape system. That's true. Yeah, you got to manage your mind. But then there's additional internal lighting. You can pay up for solar panel array that would that survive a tsunami external solar panel array and you're

getting hit by a giant wave. I mean maybe if it was properly shielded with some sort of you know, like a like a really firm plexiglass of situation. I'm wondering about that. But then additional internal insulation acoustic and thermal. And then finally they've got color options. And I thought the whole point was we wanted to be visible though, Yeah, well it's this red orange color. I mean, the other one's a yellow color. I'd imagine either one could be visible,

so maybe you can also be yellow. It would be horrible if you wanted to pick a survival capsule that was like, I don't know, seawater gray. Yeah, yeah, surely they wouldn't allow that. But maybe like zebra stripes, I could see where there might be some sort of custom

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

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

people are doing. I don't know, the toilet seems a little funny to me, but but yeah, I mean, if you can actually make a capsule and you can get it to the people who are most vulnerable to tsunamis, I think that's a noble thing to do. Plus, let's face it, if if you can't laugh about pooping in a coffee canister right on the on the on the escape barge, on the in the survival capsule, then what's

the purpose of surviving? You know, because our humanity has to survive, and that entails being able to laugh at the prospect of pooping in a folder's canister. That humorous gesture would be the true presence of a happy spirit on board. Alright, So I have one more example of an escape capsule to discuss here. So many of the capsules we've mentioned share the same mission, right to return adventurous humans to the Earth's surface from a malfunctioning aircraft

to the surface, etcetera. But what about when things go hey wire beneath the surface of the Earth. Are you talking about underground core drilling vehicles like in the Core? Um, well, we're not quite there yet. Did they have an escape capsule, like some sort of thing that came up. I'm sorry

to say this. I've never seen the Core. Oh yeah, well it makes me this idea makes me think of the the terror dome on a teenage muntant Ninja turtles, right, because it would it would drill down, and I think they had they had the equivalent of like a a little drill vehicle that would come up that was kind of like an escape capsule that the foot soldiers would jump out of in the video game. Right, I don't remember anything about that, but I believe you well it was.

It was fantastic and uh, you know, could probably not exist in real life, but here's an example of something that did. So you can find various mining escape capsule patents out there, but the most notable deployment it real life deployment of so of one of these systems came 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 miles from the mind's interests entrants. So this was a pretty big deal. They made a movie about it recently, like I think they caught it thirty three or the thirty three. Um, so they're they're trapped in this hostile environment. Um,

it's it's hot down there, it's dark. Uh, it's cramped, and they've got to get out right, So to rescue them, what they did is they utilize steel rescue capsules and these these were updated takes on the torpedo like doll Busch bomb that have been employed since the mid nineteen fifties. Developed in Germany. Doll bush bomb. Yeah, that's what they called it because I guess it kind of looks like a bomb, kind of looks like a torpedo. And this was used. This was employed again in the mid nineteen

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

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

this torpedo looking device. Each one had retractable wheels to allow for a smoother ride to the surface, so the wheels would skit along the sides of the vertical shaft that you're you're being pulled back up. Each one have an oxygen supply, lighting, video and voice communications, reinforce roof to protect against a foot rocks that are falling, because rocks could fall uh down the tunnel that you're ascending

and you need protection against those. Um. And also an escape hatch with a safety device to allow the passenger to lower themselves back down if the capsule became stuck on up. God, that would be scary. Yeah. So these were these were pretty These were pretty amazing little devices. Um, and they've I think they were they were making the rounds for a little bit, like a little bit because they were showing them off because they were able to

successfully get everyone out of the mind using the Phoenix capsules. Really, yeah, this is weird. I'm feeling this. I don't usually experience strong clustrophobia. But just now contemplating this, I'm overwhelmed. Well you should. You should definitely check out more about the story. There was a wonderful I want to say, was an episode of the Ideas podcast out of Canada that into it that I think the interviewed an author had written

a book about it. I think it's the same book that the movie was based on, and they went into detail just talking about just how bad the situation was, and like the attitudes among the survivors and and what was going on top side as well. So it's a it's a really interesting human drama. I haven't seen the movie yet, but it kind of makes me want to see it. Interesting all right, So we've talked about aviation escape pods, we've talked about space escapes pods, we've talked

about whether related escape pods, mining escape pods. What we have possibly left out here, Um, you know, what they need is a human body escape pod for the brain. That's one of the cybernetic upgrades I'm hoping for. Yeah, or it sounds more like a spiritual upgrade as well. No, essentially is right the brain you get to maybe the brain upper nervous system is encased in a survival eject capsule. Okay, something bad happens to the body, your brain kind of

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

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

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

have ever been created. So if you've been thinking of one out there and you're like, oh, why aren't you talking about this? You should let us know. Yeah, let us know about the fictional ones. Let us know about the real life escape capsules. Let us know about some of the proposed ones that just haven't come to fruition yet. We would love to hear about them. And hey, let us know you want to hear. Do you want to hear an episode about fallout shelters? We could do it. Uh?

Does that? Does that episode about the guns and under space interest you? Let us know we could do that episode as well. Really, it's it's all, it's all on the table. And if you want to get in touch with us, reach out to us as stuff to blow your mind. Dot com that's our mothership. That's we find links out to our social media accounts, as well as various podcast episodes, Blog post videos, you name it, and if you want to get in touch with this directly you can do so. As always that blow the mind.

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