Something similar was done in some aircraft piston engines in the 1930's. There was a system called the Coffman Cartridge Starter, and you'd load a cordite cartridge into a firing chamber attached to a piston which was set up to turn the engine. Fire the cartridge, and the engine would turn over.

There is/was also a cartridge starter on B-52 bombers. It was used to get the bombers off the runways faster in the Cold War. The flight crew would run or be driven out to the plane, the ground crew would load a cartridge into two of the eight engines, and the pilots would get the engines set for starting, and then a huge cloud of what looks like black powder smoke suddenly appears out of the inboard engine pair. The inboard two engines start, and that gives the pilots enough power to taxi out into takeoff formation, during which they use the first two engines to get the other six engines running before take-off. This would allow (I'm told by old Vietnam-era USAF vets) the B-52's to be rolling off the runway in under 10 minutes. The "cart start" idea was to enable the B-52's to respond to an inbound attack by the USSR and be airborne before Soviet missiles would get here.