Ever since the first moon rise that was looked upon by modern humans, man has thought of visiting the stars. Likewise, ever since Flash Gordon and his ray gun hit the comic books, man has looked to arming its space travelers. US Astronauts have long carried survival knives for the past fifty years from the Mercury program all the way through the current Shuttle program. The Soviet space program decided that both a survival knife and a firearm would be needed. This is because it was not uncommon for cosmonauts to wait lengthy periods of time in the middle of nowhere on the desolate Soviet steppe where wolves and other predators were very common. The Soviets have long carried guns in space. They even armed at least one space station with a 23mm automatic cannon and to this day have a firearm aboard the International Space Station
The principal Soviet space gun was the TOZ TP-82 pistol (known in Russia by the designation ??-82). It is a three barreled firearm designed at the nearly three hundred year old Tula Arms Factory by Soviet engineer Vladimir Alexandrovich Paramonov in 1982. Each of the three barrels are single shot, 11-inch (300mm) long break open tubes that are reloaded by 'cracking' the weapon open and inserting live rounds and removing shell casings by hand. The top two barrels were smoothbore and used a 49 caliber (12.5mm) shotgun shell while the third barrel, located underneath these two larger barrels, was rifled and chambered in the standard soviet army 5.45x39mm AK-74 assault rifle rounds. The weapon was 26 inches (670mm) long overall with the removable butt stock attached. When loaded and the stock attached it weighed just over 6 pounds (2.4kg). The buttstock hid a razor sharp machete that could be removed and used by itself.
The cosmonaut would carry an ammunition belt with a wide range of rounds available to him. The shotgun would have ten rounds of medium sized shot comparable to a western 28-gauge shotgun to be used for hunting small animals if needed to provide food for cosmonauts marooned in Siberia. The rifle barrel was issued ten rounds of ammunition. These were custom made soft pointed 55-grain (3.6 gram) rounds for hunting medium game or killing wolves with an effective range of some 200 meters. Finally five red signal flares were added to the lot. The flares would be capable of being shot from one of the smoothbore shotgun barrels and could reach an altitude of some 150 meters (492 feet) and burn there for about ten seconds. When carried on the Soyuz craft these weapons were stored unloaded in a sealed metal container stowed between two couches.
The TP-82 first took off with the Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in 1986 and became standard kit for more than twenty years. Foreign astronauts from the US and other countries trained with the weapon in preparation for international work on both the Mir and the ISS space stations. In 2007 the TP-82 was retired from use due to the fact that its ammunition, long out of production, had become too unstable for safe space travel. It is reported that the weapon has been replaced on the current NAZ-3 emergency kit by a small automatic pistol of unknown make and a 120mm folding knife with two blades.
Sources
Malkin, Bonnie Russians Blast Off Without Space Pistol The Telegraph October 15 2007
Oberg, James Russia Has the Corner on Guns in Space MSNBC Febuary 12, 2008
Wade, Mark Astronautix.com
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