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A comment on Soyuz capsule landing and retrieval photos. Parent comment

Re:Soyuz capsule landing and retrieval photos by saintamh on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @05:22PM (#1761551)
I believe you're thinking of the Voskhod 2 mission. They landed in deep snow in the Urals and had to camp the night out in their spacecraft until the rescue party could reach them the next day.

Alexei Leonov's 1st-person account can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/voskhod2 (taken from the book "Two Sides of the Moon", co-authored with Apollo 15's Dave Scott)

I'd tend to agree with my above sibling that bringing guns in a spaceship sounds like the opposite of safe, but according to Leonov they had a pistol, and "plenty of ammunition".

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Re:Soyuz capsule landing and retrieval photos by jerf on Tuesday October 05, 2010 @06:04PM (#1761709)
"bringing guns in a spaceship sounds like the opposite of safe"

After the millions of pounds of propellant spent on getting them to and from orbit, you're going to sweat a few grams of gunpowder? Everything in space is an explosive if you consider the kinetic energy involved. The gun is one of the few things in the spacecraft we can honestly say we have centuries of experience with; if that even shows up on your top 100 list of risks and concerns, you've got a pretty damn safe space program.

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