Sep 242010
… from your B-70 Valkyrie bomber. Fortunately, you have the latest, most advanced crew ejection capsule on the market, featuring a clamshell design that will safely and comfortably encapsulate you. Extendable booms will protrude aft to make you safely aerodynamically stable, and airbags will assure that your landing will be safe and comfortable!
Nothing can go wrong!
Courtesy Nankivil/SDAM
21 Responses to “So you’ve decided to eject…”
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>safely and comfortably encapsulate you
As long as your arm isn’t in the way. 😉
>safely and comfortably encapsulate you
As long as your arm isn’t in the way.
“Nothing can go wrong!”
Tell that to Al White & Carl Cross!
And if you need money after landing, you can always check under those sofa cushions for change.
My favorite ejection capsule test was the one for the B-58 where they strapped a young black bear into the capsule and ejected that from a Hustler.
Can you imagine someone on the ground seeing that descend and heading over to rescue the poor crewman inside?
Prying the capsule doors open, they get mauled be a really pissed-off bear.
They wouldn’t be expecting that, would they? 😀
Al White & Carl Cross were the two pilots that were in the XB-70 when
an F-104 collided with it during a military photo shoot,weren’t they?
I still think this would make hell of an interesting sport: skydiving in escape capsules from 30,000 feet.
Meh. I’d think that that would be much less of an experience than regular skydiving. Now, if the escape capsule was jettisoned at, say, *600,000* feet and Mach 10-ish….
Gotta start somewhere. It’s much easier to get ride to 30K than to 600K. I’d prefer the higher, of course.
Anyone else remember SpaceCub?
>Meh. I’d think that that would be much less of an experience than regular skydiving. Now, if the escape capsule was jettisoned at, say, *600,000* feet and Mach 10-ish….
How about the ultimate extreme survival sport: They launch you into low Earth orbit in a capsule programmed to re-enter at random over any large, sparsely-populated landmass. You have no idea where on Earth (literally) you’ll be trying survive on your own for the next two weeks before the launch company homes in on the capsule’s beacon.
Escape capsules are wussy. Go use the MOOSE bailout system from orbit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE
“Real Men ride MOOSE.”
Yeah, that looks like a great sport. It doesn’t require orbit, does it? I can imagine an entire industry around MOOSE.
> It doesn’t require orbit, does it?
No. Elon Musk could probably run a hell of a service using a suborbital and recoverable single-stagte version of the Falcon 9 or even Falcon 1, doing little more than chucking a lightweight, parachute-recovered carbon-fiber “rack” onto a suborbital trajectory. After burnout and exiting the amosphere, the shroud opens up and a group of people with more money and adrenaline than sense spill out, each wearing a spacesuit and a pre-formed styrofoam MOOSE-like shield. The shroud folds back up and the rack, being empty of people and devoid of things like avionics, life support systems or RCS thrusters, pops a ballute for decelleration, followed by chutes for splashdown.
The passengers freefall through space for 4-5 minutes, using a simple compressed-gas ACS system to orient themselves as they see fit (so as to get whatever view they want). As aero forces build up, the styrofoam shield , properly weighted, naturally orients itself. After the truncated “re-entry,” a drogue chute pops out from a chest pack, followed at the appropriate point by a main chute, also from a chest pack. The skydiver then splashes down, styrofoam shield first, and floats in it like a raft until pickup.
Since movement needs would be minimal, the suits could be standardized, and made relatively inexpensive. High-def video cameras and still cameras could be built in, mounted to head or shoulder.
Assuming the skydivers travel furthest, part of the “experience” would be the cruise back to the launch site, picking up not only the other divers, but also the rack and the booster, all on one ship.
If Musk *really* wanted to do this in style, get in cahoots with Branson, and replace the recovery ship with a recovery *airship.* Floats in say thirty feet over the waves and lowers a gondola with the recovery crew to pick up each diver. The booster would be easily recoverable by a reasonably sized airship.
That would be full of both win AND awesome.
Suggest it, Scott. If I had the money, I’d ride it.
“The passengers freefall through space for 4-5 minutes, using a simple compressed-gas ACS system to orient themselves as they see fit (so as to get whatever view they want). As aero forces build up, the styrofoam shield , properly weighted, naturally orients itself. After the truncated “re-entry,” a drogue chute pops out from a chest pack, followed at the appropriate point by a main chute, also from a chest pack. The skydiver then splashes down, styrofoam shield first, and floats in it like a raft…”
Sounds like an awesome new SEAL insertion method. Especially if they launch from a base inside a hollowed-out volcano.
Where did the empty-volcano idea originate? Was that first from “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”? Or is it a natural progression from the hollow-Earth idea?
Earliest I’m aware of is Verne. And he might’ve given himself the idea, dragging it forth from “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
I hope that one of these days someone does a *faithful* adaptation of 20K. No nuclear power, no ridiculous subplots, no romance… just stick to the damn novel, which was all kinds of awesome.
Yeah, that scene where they walk over and see the remains of Atlantis and the underwater volcano eruption would really be something. Another great scene would from inside of one of the ships the Nautilus rammed, as this 242-foot-long thing goes clean through it at 60 mph.
This is _so_ cool:
http://www.vulcaniasubmarine.com/TESTING%20THE%20NAUTILUS%20MINISUB.htm
There’s a whole website devoted to Verne’s Nautilus and its design here:
http://www.vernianera.com/sitemap.html
BTW, interesting piece of trivia: Harper Goff, who designed the Disney Nautilus, also designed the Proteus for “Fantastic Voyage”.
Although Verne came up with the idea of the hidden base inside the volcano, I think another major influence was the James Bond movie “You Only Live Twice” with the SPECTER rocket base inside the Japanese volcano.
For Bruce, info on the XB-70 and its crash:
http://xb70.interceptor.com/
One of my fantasies is to remake 20K with French actors, a full-size submarine set, on location, in French, and true to the novel. It’d be about 18 hours long.
Thanks for the link to vernianera.com, Pat. Much has been added since I last saw that one. The site suffers from using the Lewis translation, of course. (Hmmm… He seems to have removed comments on the retractable wheelhouse. I contributed to that in about 1999.)
I always thought the way to do it would be a TV miniseries that would trace Nemo’s history from his upbringing as an Indian prince who was educated in Europe, through the Sepoy Mutiny, the Nautilus, and his death on Lincoln Island.
One scene that would be fun is British troops attacking his kingdom when big glass spheres the size of bowling balls start getting fired out of pneumatic cannons at them and throwing lighting bolts around inside their ranks when the shatter on impact.
Another one (which unfortunately, was pretty close to the truth at the time*) would be when all these European firms start getting orders for things like hull plates and frame members, a hardened steel ship ram, a very advanced design ship’s screw that apparently operates at very high RPM, and giant electric motors…all from some anonymous buyer who pays cash on the barrel head for them…and fulfill those orders without batting an eye, no questions asked.
* Like when Vickers and Sons built the battlecruiser Kongo for the Japanese in 1911-13, even though it was more capable than any battlecruiser in the Royal Navy. The Japanese happily took it and back-engineered three copies of it, getting fully up to speed with contemporary naval building techniques in the process.
Another good example was when the Kaiser was a little miffed to find French artillery shells equipped with Krupp fuzes were being shot at the Prussian troops in 1870.
Well, rats. Someone at astronautix.com came up with the idea I had. Fourth paragraph:
http://www.astronautix.com/fam/rescue.htm
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