Check out this video at around the 4:45 mark.
What would lunar astronauts need machetes for?
Landing in the wild when they come back to earth? Small mistakes or variations can have a severe impact on where astronauts land when they come back to earth, especially if they were coming back from the moon.
Huh. Only thing that makes any sense to me is as general survival and utility gear after returning to Earth. E.g., maybe after splashdown the parachute gets tangled around the capsule and might capsize everything if it isn’t cut away. After that, I guess for dealing with sharks, commies, or moon-hitchhikers before the recovery helicopter arrived?
And lo, Google and the Smithsonian deliver: Rucksack #1, Survival Kit, which also included emergency lights, a radio beacon, sunglasses, sunscreen, and what appears to be some sort of chemical water desalination packs.
I’m gonna have to watch this whole documentary next time I get the time. Thanks for the link.
Cool! (Though that is really a Bowie knife) - No Swiss army knife?
The Sovs were so concerned about landing their man/men/woman on terra firma inside the SU that - at least as much is known - they might have blown the Vostok1 capsule up if it landed somewhere… errant. And Yuri didn’t have any of those supplies.
To feed Metal Munching Moon Mice
The Russians carried machetes in their capsules too, but theirs folded away into the butt of their shotgun: TP-82 - Wikipedia
No, it is a machete. One with a saw blade spine. Here it is shown next to a Randaĺl Astronaut Survival knife (far left) and a paratrooper knife (center). Swiss Army Knives were carried on at leastsome shuttle missions.
An Apollo capsule could land on land if needed, with a higher chance of injury than at sea, but still quite survivable. The Block 2 capsules had deep travel shock absorbers that were designed to cope. What would cause a problem would have been a critical emergency that required re-entry essentially immediately, or with no option for timing to choose the landing site. A major problem in the ascent or first orbit would be the most likely time. Apollo 13 managed to gain enough time on its return to allow a choice of landing site, bit there was a risk they would simply have had to dive in no matter what was beneath them. Nations around the world offered naval assistance if needed (including the Russians). So for Apollo missions there was a reasonable chance of an on-land landing with a day or so before rescue was possible. A stretch, but not out of the question. Maybe 1% of launches might have been the thinking.
Recall that when they had an “oops” on the Soviet space station Mir and had to isolate the leaky module, I remember reading that some of emergency measures included chopping cables and hoses with an axe to close the hatch. It would have taken too long to properly disconnect them all. (My wife bought me the DVD “Mission to Mir” and whenever she complained about my sloppiness for the next while, I could say “I have seen the future and it is messy”.)
So it’s always prudent to have whatever tools you can imagine handy “just in case”.
That’s because the modules and gear were connected by cables that ran through the hatchways, blocking the hatch doors from closing. Just maybe not the safest design…
I was confused by the OP referring to the “Lunar Command Module”, which doesn’t exist. There’s the Apollo Command Module (aka capsule) and the Apollo Lunar Module (aka LEM). They are separate spacecraft.
The machetes and survival kits are in the Command Module. The Lunar Module doesn’t have survival kits, much less machetes, as NASA wanted to save as much weight as possible and survival kits would be useless on the moon.
Yeah, everything was ad-hoc evolved design - and quite messy. The Imax movie is quite interesting to watch. (And they started to get interesting mold growth from condensation in hidden spots and other weird problems…) But the point is that someone, somewhere in Russian mission command thought to put an axe on a space station.
NASA tried to prepare the astronauts to survive anything. They trained for jungle survival in Panama, and desert survival in Nevada and Washington (state, not city).
Check out some of the photos on this page:
You appear to be the only one who was confused.
To be fair, the Apollo vehicles were called the Command and Service Module (CSM) of which the Command Module (CM) was the inhabited part, and separate from that was the Lunar Module (LM) that took them to the moon. So the craft actually inhabited by astronauts were the Command Module and the Lunar Module. Which one does “Lunar Command Module” refer to? He’s quite right in pointing out that it’s confusing terminology. Obviously the OP meant “the Apollo Command Module used on the lunar missions” but that wasn’t immediately clear.
He wasn’t the only one ‘confused’, he was the only one who pointed out the confusing (and incorrect) OP title terminology (which I was about to clarify if he hadn’t). 
Not only the title but in the OP itself, he asks, “What would lunar astronauts need machetes for?” which clearly implies (to me) he was asking why would they need them on the Moon*!*
In case the wind blows you off course and you land on the jungle part of the moon.
There aren’t jungles on the moon.
The cheese makes for poor soil.