Russia has the corner on guns in space

Learning to space shoot
Still, the guns are fun to have — or at least a lot of fun to train with. Familiarization with the gun usually takes place during survival training in the Black Sea, when the crews train to safely exit a spacecraft floating on the water (although a firing range at the cosmonaut center at Star City near Moscow is sometimes used for training). After floating around in the water for a day or two, the astronauts and cosmonauts take a few hours to fire several rounds from each chamber off the deck of the training ship.

"It was amazing how many wine, beer and vodka bottles the crew of the ship could come up with for us to shoot at," astronaut Jim Voss, who spent a stint aboard the international space station in 2001, told me.

"It was very accurate," he continued. "We threw the bottles as far as possible, probably 20 or 30 meters, then shot them. It was trivial to hit the bottles with the shotgun shells, and relatively easy to hit them with the rifle bullets on the first shot."

Astronaut Dave Wolf, who spent four months aboard Russia's Mir space station in 1997-98, agreed that the space weapon was "a wonderful gun."

"I found it to be well-balanced, highly accurate and convenient to use," Wolf said.

Mike Foale, the only astronaut who served aboard both Mir and the international space station, trained with the gun and found it to be pretty standard. “Other than firing flares, birdshot and a hard slug from its three barrels, during sea and winter survival training, I can’t say it is very unique,” he told me. He added, as if in reassurance, “The Soyuz commander controls its use.” 

Should space be a gun-free zone?
And here’s the safety issue that nobody seems to want to talk about. As the space station crew size increases, with a much wider range of crew members (including paying passengers, either tourists or representatives of national research groups from Malaysia, Chile, Venezuela or elsewhere), everyone on board will have access to the gun in the Soyuz. By 2009 there will always be two Soyuzes attached, so two guns will be available.

Perhaps a year or so ago, nobody would have raised an eyebrow over "trained spacefarers" being able to grab a gun at will, for whatever reason they felt like. But in the wake of the past year's tragic violence involving professional astronauts and space center veterans, and in light of stories now surfacing over psychological crises on past missions (including one threatened suicide that the mission commander took very seriously), the open access to such lethal hardware needs reappraisal.

At the very least, the survival kit needs to be locked, with the key (or combination) in the possession of the capsule commander. The very presence of the gun probably also needs to be reviewed again, to determine if it is a critical piece of safety gear or a space disaster just waiting to go off.

The next Soyuz launch is set for April 8. The handgun is probably already packed. If Moscow wants to show it is really serious about keeping space “weapons-free,” and keeping orbiting astronauts and cosmonauts free of too-easy access to lethal weapons, the gun ought to be removed. Carry a machete, carry a Taser — but stop carrying guns into space.

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