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Comment by bagacrap | Hacker News Reader

Required to fend off hypothetical bears or actual ones? I can find no source mentioning an actual encounter with wild animals. Also it seems like we should be past the days of leaving cosmo/astronauts in the wilderness by themselves for 3 days before picking them up.

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Seems like theoretical bears according to wikipedia:

> The location in which the capsule touched down was too dense for a helicopter to land and recover the crew. Leonov and Belyayev could have likely been recovered by a helicopter with the use of a rope and ladder or rescue basket but Soviet Leader Leonid Brezhnev strictly prohibited cosmonauts to be rescued with those methods. [why?] This resulted in Leonov and Belyayev spending a total of 3 days, two nights, in the forest before finally being recovered. The cosmonauts did come partially equipped for this situation taking a survival kit which included a knife and a pistol.

(Loving the why)

However "we went to space but our cosmonauts got eaten by bears on landing" would be pretty high on the "black eye" scale.

Maybe they could just deliver the guns by helicopter.

Or shoot the bears from the helicopter, full "Apocalypse now" style!

But there weren't any bears, they should have delivered some bears by helicopter first.

A shame there’s no mod for this design challenge in KSP

I'm sure BDArmory could get you most of the way there.

I have some friends who've done week-long ski tours in remote parts of Siberia and the Russian Far East. Their guides all carried serious rifles or shotguns with slugs, and made sure everyone in the party knew how to shoot.

Their closest Grizzly encounter was a bear that stumbled across them, and charged at their lead skier from ~200m out. The guide shot the bear twice, but it still managed to get within 20m of the group before it dropped.

Here in the US, I know two hikers who've been attacked by Grizzlies in the Rockies, and another guy who got jumped in Alaska. All three survived, but required medical evacuation and hospitalization... The guy in Alaska nearly bled to death from a broken rib tearing into the blood vessels feeding his kidney.

So I'm not sure what the likelihood of bear attacks would be--but it does happen, and the consequences can be quite severe.

Did you wait until after you got covid to take the vaccine?

There is a known danger of bear attacks[1] and we have a safe & effective countermeasure. Why not be prepared?

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/bears-eat-wealthy-coupl...

Because there's also a known danger of mental health challenges with astronauts and that risk must be weight against potential bear attacks.

This is comical. There are a 1000 of other ways to make things go wrong in space.

Surely adding the 1001st way is a way of increasing the chance of things going wrong.

I don't understand why some people refuse to accept this is a matter of tradeoffs and the presence of a gun isn't an absolutely good or bad thing.

Many people in the USA see guns with religious fervour. It's not a matter of logic or risk mitigation, it's a matter of faith in guns.

If you read TFA there is a perfectly reasonable suggestion that the gun should be only accessible from outside the capsule, thus reserving it for its intended use after landing. That suggestion was rebuffed.

It's perfectly reasonable from a theoretical standpoint, but what kind of engineering modifications would be involved? It's not as simple as bolting a compartment to the side. They'd have to engineer something recessed so that it doesn't interfere with the aerodynamic profile of the capsule. Do-able, sure, feasible, probably not. What would happen if the capsule landed gun compartment side down? If I were a Russian engineer and project manager I'd tell you to get out of my office with such a frivolous request.

Edit: I also realized that an external firearm container would likely imply the handgun would be exposed to the vacuum of space and the temperature swings involved. Given that Soyuz capsules can be in space for months at a time, there would have to be considerable re-engineering of the firearm and the ammunition in order to accommodate this proposed change.

Wouldn’t heat of re-entry potentially cause a cook-off? That could be incredibly dangerous.

So if the bear is outside of the capsule and you're safely (for now) inside it, do you risk going outside to get the gun? Or do you wait for the bear to peel open the capsule like a can of sardines?

It’s an airtight capsule. The bear isn’t going to be interested in it until you open it.

Also, bears don’t have can openers.

In Yosemite, park rangers will happily show you many pictures of cars that were torn open by bears searching for food: door frames pried out and bent in half, sheet metal gouged and dented, upholstery shredded. These are just the cute and cuddly North American black bears; the brown bears in Russia are 2-3x larger, with claws several inches longer.

It does not seem likely that a crashed cosmonaut would encounter hungry bears or wolves, but I can see why they might want to take precautions.

> The bear isn’t going to be interested in it until you open it.

So you open the door, you see a bear, it sees/smells you and starts running, and you close the door just in time to avoid being immediately eaten. Now what?

> Also, bears don’t have can openers.

Bears are the can openers.

"A wolf remains a wolf, even if he hasn't eaten your sheep."

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