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"?
IIRC the "claymore on a stick" option looked the best back then.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
Are these stations easier to maneuver than I imagine? Sounds like someone was imagining age of sail type of combat.
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.
If the gunshot creates shrapnel or propels the gun away, it might create additional hardship for the remaining crew.
I don't think this is an ideal mechanism.
The description blurb reads:
"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
Why not? I think the failure youre defending against is "Retrorockets have failed but the capsule is still pressurized", so you could easily just take the pill and have a nicer death than suffocating.
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.
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.
So the pistol was presumably for the astronaut to use on himself?
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...
[1] https://forum.dvdtalk.com/movie-talk/257651-armageddon-gatli...
~Every StackExchange mod ever.
> Use precise geolocation data.
Why does this site need to share my precise geolocation with 263 partners? It's madness.
Like this one, most of the questions are worded to enable an easy answer from a primary source.
In one instance the account answers its own question within the same minute: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/31279/how-was-the-...
In another instance, the account replies to a comment with "Nonetheless, this would be the question to document any examples."
People were amazed he would answer every C# and WPF questions minutes after they were posted.
I am convinced to this day he did the same thing.
And then they wonder why the whole group is dying
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.
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?
https://called2voyage.github.io/