Russia has the corner on guns in space

James Oberg NBC News space analyst

HOUSTON - All self-respecting “space cadets” of the 1950s carried holstered sidearms to fend off the spies, wandering carnivores and assorted bug-eyed monsters they might meet in space. That was Hollywood, of course. The notion that modern space cadets blast off carrying guns is so silly that space officials won't even talk about the idea. But that does not mean the astronauts are not armed.

In fact, Moscow’s latest diplomatic offensive to get a treaty banning weapons in space may be shot down by one of the proposed pact's little-noticed provisions: Nobody else should get to put weapons in space, but Russia gets to keep the ones it already has.

Cosmonauts regularly carry handguns on their Soyuz spacecraft — and actually, that's not unreasonable. There are practical and historical justifications.

Last fall’s off-course landing of a returning Russian Soyuz spaceship, with three fliers aboard, served as a reminder that unpleasant "contingencies" can occur on even the most sophisticated space mission. Prudence dictates that some precautions be made ahead of time to handle such problems, as long as the precautions don’t introduce more hazards than the original contingency they were designed to neutralize.

The potential for landing far off course, beyond the reach of rescue forces for hours if not days, has led Russian space engineers to add special emergency kits to their landing capsules. These kits contain food rations, water bottles, warm clothing, rope for making a shelter using the capsule’s parachute, fish hooks and miscellaneous other survival gear. Gemini and Apollo spacecraft carried similar kits.

For decades, the standard Soyuz survival pack has included a gun. And not just any gun, but a deluxe all-in-one weapon with three barrels and a folding stock that doubles as a shovel and contains a swing-out machete. Three types of ammunition — rifle bullets, shotgun shells and flares — come in a belt attached to the gun.

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Plans are to use it only in special circumstances on return to Earth — but in space, on occasion, plans have a way of turning out very differently. The presence of the gun, especially in light of recent space team psychological problems, may be an invitation to a future disaster.

Dropping a space bombshell
Just before last October's Soyuz launch, a British news report said that the gun, manufactured by a factory that is now in an independent country, was being phased out because all the in-stock ammunition had exceeded its certified shelf life. In its place, a standard Russian army sidearm was now to be carried.

Following up on that report, I asked Soyuz commander (and current space station resident) Yuri Malenchenko during a downlinked news briefing whether this story was true — whether there had indeed been a change in the type of weapon included in the survival kit.

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After a long and lively conversation with other members of the crew, televised but with the sound off, Malenchenko answered. He denied any knowledge of a change in the type of gun, and expressed only marginal familiarity with the existence of the gun at all. He launched into the official rationalization for needing protection in case of being lost during return to Earth —an issue I had never disputed.

The two other members of his Soyuz crew — one of them, a NASA astronaut — hung in the background, silent. They had trained with the gun as part of flight preparation, too — but they weren’t about to say anything if they weren’t directly asked.

The press office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston adamantly refuses to discuss the gun, saying it is a piece of Russian hardware and needs to be described by the Russians. (They know full well that the Russians have never, and probably never will, respond to such queries). NASA representatives profess to have no photographs of Americans training with the gun, although there are plenty of other training photographs from Moscow showing Americans doing other preparatory practice.

The only weapons-training photographs ever released are on the Web sites of two private spaceflight participants, South Africa's Mark Shuttleworth and Iranian-American entrepreneur Anoushah Ansari, both multimillionaires — and both of whom have posed for a photo with the gun in their hands.

Carrying the firearm
In flight, the gun is packed in a metal canister that remains stashed between two of the three couches in the Soyuz. If all goes well, the canister is never opened. At the end of the mission, after landing, the gun is usually presented as a gift to the Soyuz spacecraft commander.

Originally, guns began being packed on Soyuz flights after a far off-course landing in March 1965 led to stories of encounters with wolves (or in some versions, a very hungry bear). Cosmonauts loved recounting these stories, even though official accounts later made it clear that some wolves had only been spotted by a rescue helicopter a mile or two from the downed capsule, and chased off from the air — the cosmonauts never even saw them. But good survival stories are hard to resist.

Guns were never carried aboard U.S. spacecraft. Instead, a sharp machete served as the most serious armament for a jungle landing. Besides, with a worldwide U.S. network of bases and existing air-sea rescue forces, odds were that any downed astronauts would be found and rescued pretty quickly. The same now goes for Soyuz spacecraft supporting the international space station and usually carrying an U.S. crewmember at launch and landing — any off-course vehicle would have the entire U.S. rescue team at their disposal almost immediately. But the legend of the hungry wolves trumps current realities, so the guns have remained.

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