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.
[−]SV_BubbleTime · 2026-11-15 Sun 16:05 UTC ·
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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…
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
"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).
And how would that suicide pill work exactly? It's not like they could reach into their pocket and pop it in their mouth. That means it has to be in the suit and specifically in the helmet. Again, how would that work? Where's the pill located so that it is accessible in the helmet? Did they replace a tooth so they could just bite down really hard like other nonsense spy movies? So much of this doesn't track
> It's not like they could reach into their pocket and pop it in their mouth.
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.
I think he is referring to the soviet in the 2013 link. He was in his suit when he got pinned.
> Though no NASA astronaut has ever taken a suicide pill into space, the same cannot be said for their Russian cosmonaut colleagues. Alexey Leonov, the first man to conduct a spacewalk, took one with him on his historical 12-minute stroll on March 18th, 1965, just in case he was unable to return to the spacecraft and his colleague Pavel Belyayev was forced to leave him adrift in orbit. He almost needed it. When trying to reenter his spacecraft, Leonov's stiffened suit became stuck in the entryway. He was forced to depressurize his suit slightly in order to dislodge himself, slide inside the craft, and close the hatch.
[−]throwawayffffas · 2026-11-15 Sun 16:29 UTC ·
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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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP-82
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...
https://youtu.be/pvjgIxuVdo4?is=7sF64RM0qTNqJguw
Wolf predation attacks on humans are rare, but far more common than brown bear attacks.
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.
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.
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).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.
> Though no NASA astronaut has ever taken a suicide pill into space, the same cannot be said for their Russian cosmonaut colleagues. Alexey Leonov, the first man to conduct a spacewalk, took one with him on his historical 12-minute stroll on March 18th, 1965, just in case he was unable to return to the spacecraft and his colleague Pavel Belyayev was forced to leave him adrift in orbit. He almost needed it. When trying to reenter his spacecraft, Leonov's stiffened suit became stuck in the entryway. He was forced to depressurize his suit slightly in order to dislodge himself, slide inside the craft, and close the hatch.
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?