Short answers, pulled from the story.
MOOSE originally stood for Man Out Of Space Easiest, then was renamed Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment. General Electric proposed the system in the early 1960s as an emergency bail-out device for astronauts stranded in orbit.
An astronaut in a spacesuit would climb into a six-foot polyethylene terephthalate film bag and fill it with polyurethane foam from pressurized canisters. A twin-nozzle rocket motor would slow the astronaut's orbital speed enough to begin reentry, an ablative heat shield on the bag would protect against atmospheric heating, and a parachute would automatically deploy at 30,000 feet to reduce descent speed to 17 mph.
MOOSE weighed 200 lb and fit inside a suitcase-sized container. Despite its compact packaging, it included a rocket motor, a large foam-filled bag, a heat shield, parachute, radio equipment, and a survival kit.
Neither NASA nor the U.S. Air Force expressed interest in MOOSE, and the program was quietly shelved by the end of the 1960s. General Electric performed preliminary component tests but the system never advanced to operational use.
U.S. Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger's freefall from a balloon at 103,000 feet in August 1960 helped demonstrate the feasibility of extreme high-altitude parachuting, which was a key assumption underlying the MOOSE concept. His jump was not a direct MOOSE test, but it provided evidence that a person could survive descent from extreme altitudes.
General Electric flew heat shield material on a Mercury mission, inflated a foam-filled bag with a human subject inside to test encapsulation, and test-dropped dummies and a human subject in MOOSE foam shields from short distances. These were preliminary component tests rather than full system trials.