Why did some Apollo missions carry a grenade launcher? | Hacker News Reader

Why did some Apollo missions carry a grenade launcher?

space.stackexchange.com

101 pointsSkyfall10662 comments

"The mortar package is activated by the "arm grenades" and "fire grenades" commands from Earth. The arm grenades command is applied to and gated through the command gating to the grenade arming circuitwhich charges the regulaz and sequential firing capacitors of the four grenades by applying a Z4-volt arming signal. A grenade arm pulse is also applied to the data handling function indicating receipt of the command."

Page 2-170 (179 of the PDF) of reference [1].

[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710014816 [1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19710014816/downloads/19...

The soviets did regularly carry a gun. For survival purposes, as they were landing in Siberia which has wolves and pretty big bears.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP-82

Feels a bit excessive. Wolves and brown bears generally avoid humans. Polar bears see us as food but brown bears do not.

"Generally" implies there are exceptions. Would hate to be unprepared.

Of course there are exceptions but ticks kill more people than bears and wasps kill way more people.

Ticks and wasps are much, much more common than bears.

It's never excessive to carry a gun.

If you’re a pilot or cosmonaut in Siberia, you might not have come down as planned and might be there for a while. An injured, possibly bleeding human could be easy prey. They also have tigers…

You might be underestimating how remote some Soviet capsules landed. If they overshot their landing site they might be alone in the wilderness for days until rescue teams arrived

"Kosmonaut survives space mission, gets mauled by bear protecting her cub" is not a great headline. Bringing gun was relatively cheap insurance

Might need something to eat if you have to wait a few days for the rescue team to reach you.

Gun and bear solves that problem too.

A gun helps with that, too.

Want, not need. A few days without food is quite survivable for a healthy human. And if you get selected for a space flight, you are healthy.

Brown bears attack people in Russia quite frequently [1].

[1] https://meduza.io/en/feature/2026/09/11/russia-has-a-bear-pr...

I think it's important not to overgeneralize with something that might potentially kill you. The brown bears in Japan can be deadly. A 380 kg and 2.7-m-tall brown bear, which twice attacked the village of Tomamae, killing 7 people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ussuri_brown_bear#Interactions...

26 fatalities due to bear attacks this year: https://tass.ru/obschestvo/28211259 https://eia.media/ru/article/society/6aa937759a7947f75201876... https://www.rbc.ru/society/15/09/2026/6aa937759a7947f7520187... This year bear encounters made headlines in Russia, but the number of fatalities isn't unusual. Records is 80/year in 1985, 1986 and 1996. Brown bears don't see us as food as long as there is some other food available. If food is scarce this year (some random dude on the internet says that there were an early thaw followed by freeze in 2024 that cause pine cone yield in 2026 to fail) they might attack. Either out of desperation or when encountered over a food source (i. e. garbage dump) and mistakes a human for a competitor.

Salyut 3 also had a "self-defence gun" derived from an aircraft autocannon mounted to the station, enabling them to shoot at approaching enemy spacecraft

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salyut_3#On-board_gun

They most certainly have a shank stashed on ISS somewhere

There also might be some unfriendly people. Like escaped convicts living in the woods, in the middle of nowhere.

I believe people involved in the program have since admitted that this was mostly to commit suicide in case they got stuck with no way home

    nasa employee: oh hey u guys are back early
    astronaut: moon's haunted
    nasa employee: what?
    astronaut: *loading a pistol and getting back on the rocket-ship* moon's haunted.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/moons-haunted

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0Cjo1MWGZg

Normally, I am glad that Hacker News policies meme references. There is already a reddit.

But I liked this comment be caused of its know your meme link. I learned something.

Well, I learned two things. One, I learned about the meme. Two, I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker!

> I learned not to trust Know Your Meme when it asks me to turn off my adblocker

Now why on Earth would you comply with that request?!

Because I am sympathetic to the idea that they offer a service paid for by ad revenue. If want the service, it has to be paid for somehow. I don't mind ignoring a few innocuous ads if it means the service remains "free."

yeah but that's the point: 'innocuous ads' have never been tested on the net.

it started as attention seeking eye-knifes, transitioned into the sex sells & hardcore gamer crap, and ended up as 'legal' reverse mortgages/fake charities/malware/data-harvesting.

I think it's safe to say that experiment has been tried.

I refrained from posting a humorous comment otherwise my reply would have been “becase you never know”

Like it was just a default for the game engine they were using.

Doom 3 motto: "The UAC is making safer worlds through superior firepower."

Now I'm wondering how far a regular military grenade launcher could lauch grenades on the moon

About six times further with zero drag. So 3.6Km, or from Buckingham Palace to St Paul's Cathedral.

Since there is no atmosphere even a bit further.

That's already what zero drag meant

We could also say it's about a 15 minute run for a healthy person

And the follow-up question: Could it put one into a moon orbit if done right?

There are a few guns that exist that could achieve the necessary velocity (just shy of 4,000 mph) but they’re not handheld. But yes, it would be possible for the right gun to fire a bullet that went around the moon and hit you in the back of the head.

First thought: were these fragmentation grenades? Second though: nope: not useful for seismic research. Third though: on the moon, thrown fragmentation grenades wouldn't be safe for the thrower.

Without fragmentation, isn't it just going to fly off in one direction with very little damage in any other direction?

Because the howitzer wouldn't fit?

> They were part of an active seismic imaging experiment

That is what we call plausible deniability.

(Everyone complaining about this topic inviting jokes, and I’m the first to have posted one. Drama sells more than silly jokes these days.)

I'm sure it's the literal truth.

Never know when you need to seismically image some hostiles for scientific verification of threat elimination.

To gun down the aliens. The answer is so obvious.

Hmm

> Due to an influx of joke comments, all joke comments on this post will be deleted.

And then they wonder why the whole group is dying

I was going to say the same. They did follow up with “However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!” but the bolded comment above significantly outweighs this.

At least this earlier comment was deemed relevant and not too jokey:

> Even more fun, Apollo 14 didn't use their grenades, and they are still on the lunar surface.

At least here it's jokes, sometimes they ask people to put valuable comments inside the chat, which is of course not publicly accessible so it's lost

The alternative to me seems to be becoming like a lot of subs on Reddit. It's part of why I like HN so much too, where the signal to noise is so much better.

It’s not you’re just fooled but garbage people with false bravado.

It actually is, on Reddit you need to collapse and scroll down a bit to get a real non-joke answer to something, over here low effort jokes tend to get pushed down.

Agree. I’m here because discussions are not padded left and right with memes and people trying to farm karma with humor tailored for maximum engagement.

Yes its in a death spiral with the new account based infinite scroll feed direction they're going to go in. Soon you'll see ai generated, or reposted, content perfectly tailored to what your unconscious shadow wants to see. Just like the rest of the apps

Yet, Reddit is alive and SE is... "struggling". Good jokes also carry information, that's why they work.

Have you read Reddit – where are the good jokes? There is just crap memes

"Reddit" as it's a single forum. Of course if you don't spend time there, I understand this take, but every subreddit is different.

On reddit there was a ton of censorship.

I dislike censorship in general. Someone else decides whether I may read comment xyz from another human being (assuming it is a human being). I don't want censor-in-the-middle people, be it on HN or reddit. Old reddit was easier to use than HN though; on HN we get time-locked as well as jokes-eliminated. That forces a more serious tone. I do not think it really improves the signal to noise ratio though; usually it means that there are fewer comments in general, including potentially interesting comments. I mean, if HN were serious about joke-censorship, any funny story shared by someone else on HN, even if historically accurate, would also have to be censored. After all you can not evaluate whether a claimed story to be true, to NOT be a "joke in disguise". I could go on and on here, but at the end of the day it just boils down as to whether people like censorship or not. You may reason that you prefer it, to "pre-filter away content you never want to read", such as a joke, but for me, I just dislike that someone else sits in the driver seat and tells me what I am allowed to read and what not. I want to decide on that on my own and I have no issue with "noise ratio"; I don't read all comments anyway, simply due to lack of time. I can only glimpse at some of them. Do you really have the time to go through all comments on each entry on HN?

I dislike (nay, find absurd) the idea that private people should provide for free a platform for random people that they’re not allowed to moderate because "censorship" and "free speech". Also, Reddit is probably the least censored mainstream discussion platform on the open internet, even after expelling all kinds of terrible people.

Nicely editorialised there, skipping the second half:

> However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!

On HN many purely jokey comments are often discouraged, being down-voted and getting replies along the lines of "this isn't Reddit". Is HN dying, by the same measure?

I think there’s a distinct difference between a community collectively deprecating something, versus individual members of a community deciding what will and will not be deleted. The first means the comments just fall away, while the second (and a statement of “we will delete your content it is not welcome here”) is actively off-putting not only to those who post that sort of content but others passing by who may be put off posting anything in case they unknowingly “break the rules”.

I don't see a problem there. “I won't post a jokey comment here as it'll just be deleted” is the system working. Much better than what has become the norm elsewhere: “delete if not allowed” which more-often-than-not means “I know this is not what is wanted here, but screw you and your rules”. They have explicitly stated that such content is welcome, just a little further away from the business end.

God forbid resource doesn’t turn into a group rewarding regurgitated jokes for internet points, it would insane. Every time I read some serious (ughhrr) book, I write trite irony on margins because I can’t process information like a normal human being anymore without turning everything into shit.

Curious, I checked that person's homepage. Looks about right for the 'no fun allowed' attitude:

https://called2voyage.github.io/

Maybe they are courting the AI agent demographic...

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