An inflatable lifeboat could one day ferry stranded astronauts back to Earth, if a prototype's test flights are successful next month.
The latest prototype will launch on a rocket from a Russian submarine in the Barents Sea off Murmansk. At about 200 kilometres up (the equivalent of a low-Earth orbit) the ship will detach and inflate, then spend 20 minutes or so falling to Earth, eventually landing, the team hopes, on Russian soil in Kamchatka.
The demonstration vehicle is shaped like a shuttlecock, and is just over 3 metres across. It carries pressure sensors and other equipment to monitor its descent. It will inflate using tanks of nitrogen, but RRSS hope eventually to use the same chemical reaction used in car airbags, which generates nitrogen gas from a powder.
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