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.
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.