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Originally Posted by Rainbow Six
This thread has reminded me of a conversation that my mates and I had in the pub a while ago.
Does anyone know if any sort of weapons were ever carried on the space shuttle (or other manned US space prorammes for that matter)? Not heavy weapons for attacking Soviet satellites etc, but sidearms or assault rifles that could be used for self defence if the shuttle returned to earth somewhere unfriendly...
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I'm almost 100% certain that there's never been any defensive arms carried on US craft. There was never a need, really: the capsules would never survive a non-water landing, and the probability of an AR-7 or the sort being useful were too slim by several orders of magnitude to justify the weight, space and risk. As for the Shuttle, every conceivable strip that could be used in an abort have already been scouted and prepared for, with folks already prepped and on alert on the ground during a launch. The orbiter is just simply not going to survive a landing if things are bad enough that none of those can be reached.
Now the Soviets and Russians did have a survival weapon in their capsules from the late 80s until 2006: the
TP-82. It had two .50 smoothbore barrels and a rifled 5.45 barrel underneath, plus a stock that doubled as a machete. There was only a small production run on the ammo and the remaining rounds were considered dicey enough that they've since gone to a regular automatic pistol (I haven't seen a reference to what model, though). The Cosmonaut corps insisted on this after a capsule went far off-course in the late 70s/early 80s and the crew spent a long night facing off a pack of wolves in Siberia.