The laws of chance suggest that a manned spacecraft will sooner or later be stranded in space. Yet neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. has a workable orbital-escape system (OES) for bringing stranded astronauts back to earth. Now, NASA engineers are designing a sort of space lifeboat that may give astronauts a reasonable shot at survival.
Developed by Caldwell C. Johnson, assistant chief of the Advanced Spacecraft Technology Division at Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center, the lifeboat is a rigid 400-lb. fiber glass shell lined with polyurethane foam and shaped like an old French bathtubnarrower at one end than at the...
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