Seeing a gun in a spacecraft “are we shooting a science fiction movie?” it may say. We can think about how logical a weapon is against the dangers that may be encountered in space. But when you find out soon, it won’t seem too illogical.
Even the cosmonauts’ clothes alone weighed 100 kilos, and why did they take heavy weapons with them? To find the answer to this riddle, we need to go back a bit.
Unlike the United States, the Soviets had trouble getting the capsules they sent into space back to Earth.
The Russians had no chance to parachute into a body of water and rescue their cosmonauts with an aircraft carrier, as the United States did. They had to land the space capsule safely on hard ground, the area covered with forest.
The forest meant an atmosphere in which dangerous aggressive animals coexisted. It is said that this was the reason why the cosmonauts took the gun with them when they went into space.
The weapons attached to the space capsule would help the cosmonauts survive if the capsule landed in a desolate and remote area in the woods.
We have no doubt that the landing of the capsule in the forest area will be met with interest by aggressive animals. The first expedition that would result in the capsule falling into the woods was in 1965, on a mission called Voskhod 2.
We know him as the first man to walk in space. Alexei Leonov, on his journey from space to Earth, had landed in one piece on a mountainous terrain when the vehicle deviated from its route. Another cosmonaut Pavo Belyayev, who was with Alexei Leonov, came across a pack of wolves.
There was Makarov, a semi-automatic pistol in the capsule, which the duo didn’t need to use.
Shortly after the two were rescued, from the 1960s onwards, the Russians began to have weapons aboard their Soyuz spacecraft. As time progressed, the TP-82 firearm special for astronauts was developed alongside the semi-automatic weapon, and this weapon, which has a firing range of approximately 200 meters, has been carried with them on space missions since 1986. In 2007, it was turned to the semi-automatic pistol model again.
NASA cosmonauts have been carrying Victorinox Swiss Army Knifes with them since the ’70s.
Cosmonauts continued to keep weapons as well as food and drink in their emergency kits. Moreover, these weapons were not simple weapons. They were carrying TP-82 Soviet swingarms developed for space programs.
During the flight, the gun was in a metal box and only opened in the opposite situation. Today, they are allowed to carry weapons in some cases for security purposes during their landing on the planet.
In short, cosmonauts carried weapons with this defense strategy they developed to protect themselves and survive extraordinary situations. Not in preparation for a war with extraterrestrials!
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