But seriously. Way back in the day when we actually landed on the moon and exited the vehicle to explore a bit, were there any weapons on the spacecraft?
I ask because at lunch we were discussing how Earth would have reacted (at the time) to finding some sort of life on the Moon, and were there ANY concessions made for that .0005% chance? You’d think if they brought a golf club, they were prepared for anything.
Now that I type this it sounds like the stupidest, most frivolous question ever, but given how LITTLE we knew, I wonder if it even crossed their minds.
I remember that this question was asked on television during the first moon walk. The answer is that Armstrong and Aldrin each did have a knife with them, although it was for scraping rocks and not for their protection.
IIRC, one of the first things done on landing was to make sure that they could take off again in a hurry if they had to. While this was meant as a contingency in case the ground started subsiding beneath them or a landing strut failed, I imagine that if moon-yetis had shown up they’d have gotten right out of there.
You left out a few zeros there. In fact, a whole bunch of zeros.
I remember at the time reading that NASA deliberately decided not to bring any sort of weapons on flights. I don’t think moon yetis would be of concern - more Russians or something - if one were paranoid enough. I believe Alan Drury’s The Throne of Saturn had a scene with a shootout between American astronauts and Communists - either Russian or Chinese. I may be wrong - it’s been a long time, and I’ve tried to expunge that book from my mind - dreadful piece of trash.
Re: astronaut knives - a guide at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum told me that every astronaut had a survival knife (and they had at least a couple of examples there), but this was really just because you never know when you might need to cut something in an emergency, fashion things ala Apollo 13, or even use it should your craft return by some rare chance in a place where you might need it, like a wooded place. IIRC it was part of a general “survival kit” that was pretty similar to that used in fighters, sans any handguns/ammunition.
By the time people walked on the moon we had many years of craft orbiting the moon, crash landing on the moon and soft landing on the moon and taking zillions of pictures. It was not “a given” that we knew little. We actually knew a tremendous amount.
Not in the Moon, but precautions were taken back on Earth to put the guys into a 21 day quarantine lest they had some Moon Flu that could wipe the Earth´s population :rolleyes:
By Apollo 14 they dropped the whole thing.
From my memory of the event, and from subsequent reading tonnes about it, about the only thing they were unsure of for safety’s sake was the actual condition of the landing site. Tho there had been about a decade’s worth of flybys, orbits, crash landings, and soft landings which yielded much detailed info, there was still some small concern that the LM might find the landing site strewn with boulders or feet deep in fine dust. Even at that, though, they had a pretty good idea of general Moon characteristics. The surprises came later, in the details and in the labs.
The Russians have carried a firearm in their spacecraft’s survival kit since an incident in 1965 when a Soviet spacecraft landed in a forest area populated with hungry wolves.
