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Danville Man to Be Armed in Space ; Astronaut Leroy Chiao Trains With a Pistol for His Russian Soyuz Voyage

Posted on: Monday, 31 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

There's something aboard every Russian spacecraft that may come as a surprise to many people -- a large handgun.

But it isn't there to fight space invaders or quell a mutiny in orbit; it's part of the crew's survival kit in case they need to protect themselves from wild animals after an emergency landing.

Danville astronaut Leroy Chiao was trained to use the "pistolet" as part of his survival training. Each space traveler who may fly on the Soyuz gets a range of winter and water survival training.

"The pistolet is a standard feature of their survival equipment," Chaio explained. "It's actually a three-barreled pistol. It can shoot these small rifle cartridges or shot pellet cartridges or a flare. So it's really quite useful.

"There's a machete in the kit, too, for chopping wood for fires. The machete also fits into the grip of the pistolet to act as stock, so it's kind of a little rifle. It's a neat little device," Chiao said.

"I went through winter survival (training) and we practiced with all of the equipment. We were out in the snow and put this pistolet together and tried the different cartridges -- the rifle cartridge, the pellet cartridge, the flares," he said.

Each NASA astronaut has a miniature survival kit (life raft, light, mirror, emergency radio, etc.) built into the astronaut's parachute harness, which is worn for launch and landing. But despite America's cowboy image, there are no guns on U.S. spacecraft.

Chiao has been training in both the United States and Russia for his October flight to International Space Station Alpha.

Chiao, 43, moved to Danville with his family when he was 7 and considers it his hometown. He worked for Lawrence Livermore lab from 1989 to 1990 before being selected to be an astronaut by NASA. He already has flown on several space missions.

The Russians have good reason to be worried about wild animals attacking space travelers.

On March 18, 1965, during the moon race, Russia launched a Soyuz with two cosmonauts, Pavel Belyayev and Alexi Leonov. Leonov performed the first spacewalk ever during the day-long mission. The primary retro rocket failed, so Belyayev had to use the backup rocket. That resulted in landing in a forest in the Ural mountains, far from rescue forces.

The crew opened up the spacecraft on their own and spent the night in the woods, surrounded by wolves. The next day, the rescue team was able to reach the cosmonauts, but they had to chop down trees to clear a landing zone for the helicopter, and the rescue team needed skis to reach the stranded crew.

After the incident with the wolves, Russia decided to add the pistolet to give their crews a means of protecting themselves.

The pistolet was used last year when a Soyuz landed off course. On May 3, 2003, American astronauts Ken Bowersox and Don Pettit and Russian cosmonaut Nikolai Budarin returned to Earth in the Soyuz TMA- 1 spacecraft.

The computer noticed a faulty sensor and put the spacecraft into a backup landing mode, which resulted in a rougher re-entry and landing 287 miles away from the planned landing site.

The crew realized they were going to be on their own for a while and decided to get out of the spacecraft on their own rather than wait for rescue forces to arrive. They crawled out, got out the survival kit and set up the emergency radio.

Two hours after landing, an aircraft reported seeing the capsule on the ground with the three space travelers outside. The crew used the pistolet to fire a flare to alert the aircraft, but it was another two hours before the first members of the landing recovery team arrived.

Fortunately, Bowersox, Pettit and Budarin didn't have to deal with a snow-covered forest filled with wolves. They landed on a grassy plain on a balmy spring day.

"It was just a great feeling to be back on Earth. It was like the dirt and grass were glowing because we hadn't seen it in so long," Bowersox said.

"We were sitting outside for the helicopter to show up and looked all around, just horizon to horizon, nothing to be seen except green grass. Very relaxing.

"It was kind of nice waiting," Bowersox said. "The three of us were there in front of the capsule waiting for the rescue forces to arrive. We knew everything was OK because we talked to the rescue airplane on the radio."

The survival kit is located within the Soyuz capsule where the crew sits for launch and landing. In theory, anybody can get access to it while the crew's in space.

This has led to amusing speculation about whether the commander would ever need the pistolet if there was a mutiny aboard.

Chiao laug "Astronauts and cosmonauts are not the types who are going to go off the handle and do something strange."

For more about the U.S. space program, visit www.nasa.gov

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