Lack of escape systems could haunt X-Prize

And saftefied the crew cabin to the point where the crew might not be able to get out in case of an internal fire?

Saftey is something you can't just buy. Even if it was, none of the X Prize teams could afford it.

Relative amounts can come from really good design, high levels of mantinence etc, but stuff slips through anyway. A lot of things can only be learnt the hard way, like the Nasa engineers attitude to the the scope of an escape system you just mentioned.

This may just be idle day-dreaming, but does anyone here remember the old MOOSE concept? I wonder if a similar concept could be applied in some way to escaping from a disabled sub-orbital vehicle that is approaching, at, or after apogee. I'm working on the assumption that merely ejecting with a parachute at around 100 km might not be a sound idea.

http://www.space.com/news/spacehistory/ ... 00923.html

The original design, before it was canned, was supposed to weigh about 90 kg (and that included a small rocket motor!). Perhaps you could put one in a ballast seat for the X-prize attempt. Would it be possible, with todays technology, to design a space suit that could inflate and ... and ... ??? ...naah ... now I'm dreaming for sure. That old MOOSE would have been a pretty amazing ride though (the idea was for it to be an absolute last resort for the return of an astronaut from ORBIT ).

Hey, that would be one extreme sports adventure! Now if you could attach a heatshield type surfboard..............

(sorry, couldn't resist the allusion to Dark Star)

that would be r0x0rz... the ONLY extreme SPORT!! ORBIT BOARDING... or some other, cooler name... <and now back to your regularly scheduled topic>

funny you should mention it Dr_Keith_H i was just checking up on it two days ago to see if it still was abandoned

i think we're fast approaching a point where this could be more than an extreme last ditch effort to survive

the part of the design i always disliked was the rocket part but one could use gas propulsion instead

here's an additional link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE

it had an inbuilt barometric pressure released patachute and should work with an even higher success rate/lower mortality rate from suborbital

completely off topic: i love the Dark Star movie

I thought the MOOSE rocket motor was to fire the astronaut AT the earth (or rather, slow their orbiting speed so that the astronaut could fall, this is not as trivial as it sounds). If so then it could be dispensed with entirely for a suborbital deployment. Give it the right profile and it might even assume an optimal orientation, as it falls into denser atmosphere, without the need for attitude thrusters.

Still, even without a rocket motor, it sounds a bit unwieldy in the original MOOSE configuration. That's why I wondered about the possibility of constructing a flight suit that could sort of ... I dunno ... POP into shape.

Like that inflateable jacket that James Bond had in "The World is Not Enough" ... can't remember it? Here's a useful link.

http://www.jamesbondmm.co.uk/q-branch/twine-gadgets.php

you're right, except it was also for maneuvering the "right side up", but if it had some selfrighting ability (like the ss1) it shouldn't be a problem, at least from suborbital

as for size "all" we need is some kind of selfinflating super-nonconducting super-isolating material weighing next to nothing. or it would be nice if we could trap a bubble of vacuum displacing about 100 kilograms (or whatever is slightly less than the weight of the occupant) of air at sealevel - the slightly negative buoyancy should make for a slow "float" down to the surface with minimal reentry heating. keeping the vacuum from contracting would be the really hard part