Space & Firearms— isn’t catastrophic!

When in a space mission, an astronaut would surely carry a ton of gears into space.  Along with a more than 100-kilogram spacesuit, several types of equipment are mandatory for the space-goer to survive in the space.

While there are plenty of highly designed technological things the space-goer would take, you might never expect something unique that he carries. And this is probably you won’t find a reason! It’s a gun, a firearm!

When was it started?

Keeping a firearm in a space launch came during the 1960s when the Soviet Union attempted the space mission for the first time in history.  At that time, there was a problem with landing the space capsules properly. The technology was not up to the mark, and landing the capsule in the sea and sending out an aircraft for rescuing the astronauts were perilous.

The capsules could have landed on the ground! However, Russia is a huge country filled with enormous numbers of jungles and remote areas. And thus, there was a fear that the cosmonauts might face the wild beasts in such areas after completing their mission from space. That was the reason why the firearms were planned to be taken. They will easily shoot a beast if it attacks them.  You might be surprised to know that even some aeroplanes carry specially designed firearms for emergency uses!

A Real Incident!

And their assumption was correct. During the mission of Voskhod 2 in 1965, Alexei Leonov and PavelBelyayev were landed almost 1000 kilometres away from the targeted landing spot in a deep forest, where they faced wild wolves. Although they had a pistol, namely Makarov, fortunately, they were not attacked by those beasts.

A Single-Use or More?

From that time, USSR started sending pistols with their cosmonauts, mostly the semi-automatic Markov, a standard sidearm introduced in the 1950s. Besides the question of being attacked by the beasts, there were other uses too. For example, those were used for sending distress signals to find the astronauts in the deep forests and remote areas of Siberia.

But there has been a debate too!

Space travelling is something extremely anxiety-driven, extremely stressful and psychologically pressurising.  Indeed it's a tough tour. And therefore, the cosmonauts might suffer from severe panic attacks. Moreover, fright, anxiety and pressure make them exhausted, which may result in self-harming or attacking others. Thus, carrying weapons has been on a stage of debate for several decades on ethical and moral grounds.