"The mortar package is activated by the "arm grenades" and "fire grenades" commands from Earth. The arm grenades command is applied to and gated through
the command gating to the grenade arming circuitwhich charges the regulaz and
sequential firing capacitors of the four grenades by applying a Z4-volt arming signal. A grenade arm pulse is also applied to the data handling function indicating receipt of the command."
Salyut 3 also had a "self-defence gun" derived from an aircraft autocannon mounted to the station, enabling them to shoot at approaching enemy spacecraft
I'm guessing that pivoting the gun and firing would impart spin to the station, is the greater concern. And then pivoting the gun to stay on target would impart even more spin on subsequent shots.
I would guess having any sort of teeth would be meaningful to dissuade whatever type of manned craft might have been able to approach them at the time.
They already had a makarov pistol with them from the start. They made this custom short barrel double shotgun with a third rifle barrel.
This was to fend off wild life and maybe hunting while waiting for the recovery team to get to them if they came down far from the designated recovery zone.
"Since Apollo 13 many people have asked me, 'Did you have suicide pills on board?' We didn't, and I never heard of such a thing in the eleven years I spent as an astronaut and NASA executive," - Jim Lovell, commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission.
For this scene, from the movie "Contact", based off his book, I guess Carl Sagan got inspiration from the Soviet Voskhod 2 mission. Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov said he was given a suicide pill by the authorities, in the event that he might get stuck outside of the Voskhod spacecraft while attempting the very first "spacewalk" or EVA (extra-vehicular activity).
For NASA's options, Gerry Griffin, a former director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, corroborated Lovell's statement, bluntly adding that if an astronaut truly wished to end his or her life, space provides plenty of opportunities. Outer space is just as effective a suicide agent as a cyanide capsule, perhaps even more so. Exposure to its empty vacuum often results in a blissful loss of consciousness in a matter of seconds. Death by asphyxiation usually follows within two minutes. (from http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/10/astronauts-and-suicide-pills.html)
Uploaded on Oct 23, 2016 at 5:36 am
As for the 2013 link, it reads that although the Americans weren't issued suicide capsules, at least one Soviet had one (although he didn't say if it was issued by the space program vs him just carrying it with him of his own accord).
Yeah thats why you invent small 2 barrel shotgun with big ammo and carry it all the way into space, while even small makarov pistol would fulfill that role
I imagine you can't take turns easily once there's a hole in the ship.
On the other hand, there are legitimate predators that will hunt and eat humans in Siberia. One team encountered wolves that they had trouble fending off, so they upgraded the pistol to a more formidable shotgun/rifle combo.
Unlikely that a handgun bullet passing through a skull will still have enough velocity to breach the hull? Even if it did, they'd just need to be deliberate with their aim vis-a-vis a steel plate.
26 fatalities due to bear attacks this year:
https://tass.ru/obschestvo/28211259https://eia.media/ru/article/society/6aa937759a7947f75201876...https://www.rbc.ru/society/15/09/2026/6aa937759a7947f7520187...
This year bear encounters made headlines in Russia, but the number of fatalities isn't unusual. Records is 80/year in 1985, 1986 and 1996.
Brown bears don't see us as food as long as there is some other food available. If food is scarce this year (some random dude on the internet says that there were an early thaw followed by freeze in 2024 that cause pine cone yield in 2026 to fail) they might attack. Either out of desperation or when encountered over a food source (i. e. garbage dump) and mistakes a human for a competitor.
You might be underestimating how remote some Soviet capsules landed. If they overshot their landing site they might be alone in the wilderness for days until rescue teams arrived
"Kosmonaut survives space mission, gets mauled by bear protecting her cub" is not a great headline. Bringing gun was relatively cheap insurance
That works if you have absolute trust the rescue team will reach you on schedule. If you are unsure whether few days won't turn into few weeks, or whether there will be a rescue team at all, it's best to secure food and shelter while you still have the energy to do it.
I think it's important not to overgeneralize with something that might potentially kill you. The brown bears in Japan can be deadly. A 380 kg and 2.7-m-tall brown bear, which twice attacked the village of Tomamae, killing 7 people.
Sky marshals have weapons and the TSA allows them.
Being an astronaut means you are trusted with extreme responsibilities and it also means extreme oversight. That's part of why the selection process is so thorough and stress response is so well evaluated before NASA will put a person in space.
Reading the parent's comment pedantically is useless and against this site's guidelines. Reading it more charitably + less literally makes more sense.
If you’re a pilot or cosmonaut in Siberia, you might not have come down as planned and might be there for a while. An injured, possibly bleeding human could be easy prey. They also have tigers…
The question is pretty unnecessary given that it references the "ALSEP Flight System Familiarization Manual" [1] which also goes into detail about the purpose of the grenade launcher.
Went down a rabbit hole to see if the Apollo "thumpers" were named so because of Dune. Apparently there were a few terrestrial thumpers in use by oil and gas surveyors prior to the book and missions... whomp whomp.
nasa employee: oh hey u guys are back early
astronaut: moon's haunted
nasa employee: what?
astronaut: *loading a pistol and getting back on the rocket-ship* moon's haunted.
Because I am sympathetic to the idea that they offer a service paid for by ad revenue. If want the service, it has to be paid for somehow. I don't mind ignoring a few innocuous ads if it means the service remains "free."
yeah but that's the point: 'innocuous ads' have never been tested on the net.
it started as attention seeking eye-knifes, transitioned into the sex sells & hardcore gamer crap, and ended up as 'legal' reverse mortgages/fake charities/malware/data-harvesting.
I think it's safe to say that experiment has been tried.
Does anyone know why they had the grenade launcher? stackexchange decided a few false positives humans getting blocked was okay if they could mitigate the corporate bots and block most of them. The end result is that I can't read the page.
There are a few guns that exist that could achieve the necessary velocity (just shy of 4,000 mph) but they’re not handheld. But yes, it would be possible for the right gun to fire a bullet that went around the moon and hit you in the back of the head.
First thought: were these fragmentation grenades? Second though: nope: not useful for seismic research. Third though: on the moon, thrown fragmentation grenades wouldn't be safe for the thrower.
All grenades have a casing the "fragments" when they go off, but some use thicker, heavier, scored metal casings to maximize the anti-personel effects of the resulting shrapnel. If you don't want shrapnel, then you make the casing light and arrange for it to break into fewer pieces. So grenades designed to produce more, heavier, sharper fragments are called fragmentation grenades.
Probably was both. NASA got a COTS component for their seismologic experiment, saving some time/budget on R&D, and military got to have a grenade launcher tested on the Moon, providing data for whatever "future warfare" programs they were surely running back then.
The alternative to me seems to be becoming like a lot of subs on Reddit. It's part of why I like HN so much too, where the signal to noise is so much better.
It actually is, on Reddit you need to collapse and scroll down a bit to get a real non-joke answer to something, over here low effort jokes tend to get pushed down.
This was a solved problem by Slashdot decades ago: You introduce a simple tagging system: "Insightful", "informative", "funny", etc. then you let the community tag comments accordingly. Then if you want to filter out jokes, or only see them, you can do so via a simple UI switch.
Agree. I’m here because discussions are not padded left and right with memes and people trying to farm karma with humor tailored for maximum engagement.
Yes its in a death spiral with the new account based infinite scroll feed direction they're going to go in. Soon you'll see ai generated, or reposted, content perfectly tailored to what your unconscious shadow wants to see. Just like the rest of the apps
I dislike censorship in general. Someone else decides whether I
may read comment xyz from another human being (assuming it is
a human being). I don't want censor-in-the-middle people, be it
on HN or reddit. Old reddit was easier to use than HN though;
on HN we get time-locked as well as jokes-eliminated. That forces
a more serious tone. I do not think it really improves the
signal to noise ratio though; usually it means that there are
fewer comments in general, including potentially interesting comments. I mean, if HN were serious about joke-censorship, any funny story shared by someone else on HN, even if historically accurate, would also have to be censored. After all you can not evaluate whether a claimed story to be true, to NOT be a "joke in disguise". I could go on and on here, but at the end of the day it just boils down as to whether people like censorship or not. You may reason that you prefer it, to "pre-filter away content you never want to read", such as a joke, but for me, I just dislike that someone else sits in the driver seat and tells me what I am allowed to read and what not. I want to decide on that on my own and I have no issue with "noise ratio"; I don't read all comments anyway, simply due to lack of time. I can only glimpse at some of them. Do you really have the time to go through all comments on each entry on HN?
I dislike (nay, find absurd) the idea that private people should provide for free a platform for random people that they’re not allowed to moderate because "censorship" and "free speech". Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet, even after expelling all kinds of terrible people.
>Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet
Absolutely not.
There are instant banned topics on Reddit. AI banned topics site wide. Go write something like “the USA imported the third world” and enjoy your instant 3-day ban.
X however, actually has some semblance of free speech. Like it or not.
Nicely editorialised there, skipping the second half:
> However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!
On HN many purely jokey comments are often discouraged, being down-voted and getting replies along the lines of "this isn't Reddit". Is HN dying, by the same measure?
I think there’s a distinct difference between a community collectively deprecating something, versus individual members of a community deciding what will and will not be deleted. The first means the comments just fall away, while the second (and a statement of “we will delete your content it is not welcome here”) is actively off-putting not only to those who post that sort of content but others passing by who may be put off posting anything in case they unknowingly “break the rules”.
I don't see a problem there. “I won't post a jokey comment here as it'll just be deleted” is the system working. Much better than what has become the norm elsewhere: “delete if not allowed” which more-often-than-not means “I know this is not what is wanted here, but screw you and your rules”. They have explicitly stated that such content is welcome, just a little further away from the business end.
I was going to say the same. They did follow up with “However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!” but the bolded comment above significantly outweighs this.
At least this earlier comment was deemed relevant and not too jokey:
> Even more fun, Apollo 14 didn't use their grenades, and they are still on the lunar surface.
God forbid resource doesn’t turn into a group rewarding regurgitated jokes for internet points, it would insane. Every time I read some serious (ughhrr) book, I write trite irony on margins because I can’t process information like a normal human being anymore without turning everything into shit.
Page 2-170 (179 of the PDF) of reference [1].
[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710014816 [1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19710014816/downloads/19...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP-82
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun
Are these stations easier to maneuver than I imagine? Sounds like someone was imagining age of sail type of combat.
This was to fend off wild life and maybe hunting while waiting for the recovery team to get to them if they came down far from the designated recovery zone.
https://vimeo.com/188517388
The description blurb reads:
As for the 2013 link, it reads that although the Americans weren't issued suicide capsules, at least one Soviet had one (although he didn't say if it was issued by the space program vs him just carrying it with him of his own accord).Over the years at least 7 soviet missions landed off-target including Yuri Gagarin.
And not like 100-500 meters off target, but 200-600 kilometers. Having a gun in such cases make perfect sense.
both massively unpleasant
But a biological solution?! I imagine a little jar full of extremely venomous spiders, one for each cosmonaut. Perhaps they'd give them names.
On the other hand, there are legitimate predators that will hunt and eat humans in Siberia. One team encountered wolves that they had trouble fending off, so they upgraded the pistol to a more formidable shotgun/rifle combo.
"Kosmonaut survives space mission, gets mauled by bear protecting her cub" is not a great headline. Bringing gun was relatively cheap insurance
Let's be honest here: the Soviets were never going to print that anyways.
[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/09/11/russia-has-a-bear-pr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussuri_brown_bear#Interactions...
Wolf predation attacks on humans are rare, but far more common than brown bear attacks.
Being an astronaut means you are trusted with extreme responsibilities and it also means extreme oversight. That's part of why the selection process is so thorough and stress response is so well evaluated before NASA will put a person in space.
Reading the parent's comment pedantically is useless and against this site's guidelines. Reading it more charitably + less literally makes more sense.
https://youtu.be/pvjgIxuVdo4?is=7sF64RM0qTNqJguw
So the pistol was presumably for the astronaut to use on himself?
1: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710014816
~Every StackExchange mod ever.
But I liked this comment be caused of its know your meme link. I learned something.
Well, I learned two things. One, I learned about the meme. Two, I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker!
Now why on Earth would you comply with that request?!
it started as attention seeking eye-knifes, transitioned into the sex sells & hardcore gamer crap, and ended up as 'legal' reverse mortgages/fake charities/malware/data-harvesting.
I think it's safe to say that experiment has been tried.
And it never is. Not just about ads, either.
don't you know that correct way is to treat any "turn off your adblocker" notification as another ad?
on Earth or on the Moon tho?
That is what we call plausible deniability.
(Everyone complaining about this topic inviting jokes, and I’m the first to have posted one. Drama sells more than silly jokes these days.)
Never know when you need to seismically image some hostiles for scientific verification of threat elimination.
I think these days we call this "synergy"?
[1] https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk/257651-armageddon-gatli...
> Use precise geolocation data.
Why does this site need to share my precise geolocation with 263 partners? It's madness.
And then they wonder why the whole group is dying
I dislike censorship in general. Someone else decides whether I may read comment xyz from another human being (assuming it is a human being). I don't want censor-in-the-middle people, be it on HN or reddit. Old reddit was easier to use than HN though; on HN we get time-locked as well as jokes-eliminated. That forces a more serious tone. I do not think it really improves the signal to noise ratio though; usually it means that there are fewer comments in general, including potentially interesting comments. I mean, if HN were serious about joke-censorship, any funny story shared by someone else on HN, even if historically accurate, would also have to be censored. After all you can not evaluate whether a claimed story to be true, to NOT be a "joke in disguise". I could go on and on here, but at the end of the day it just boils down as to whether people like censorship or not. You may reason that you prefer it, to "pre-filter away content you never want to read", such as a joke, but for me, I just dislike that someone else sits in the driver seat and tells me what I am allowed to read and what not. I want to decide on that on my own and I have no issue with "noise ratio"; I don't read all comments anyway, simply due to lack of time. I can only glimpse at some of them. Do you really have the time to go through all comments on each entry on HN?
Absolutely not.
There are instant banned topics on Reddit. AI banned topics site wide. Go write something like “the USA imported the third world” and enjoy your instant 3-day ban.
X however, actually has some semblance of free speech. Like it or not.
> However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!
On HN many purely jokey comments are often discouraged, being down-voted and getting replies along the lines of "this isn't Reddit". Is HN dying, by the same measure?
At least this earlier comment was deemed relevant and not too jokey:
> Even more fun, Apollo 14 didn't use their grenades, and they are still on the lunar surface.
https://called2voyage.github.io/