Why did some Apollo missions carry a grenade launcher?

(space.stackexchange.com)

53 points | by Skyfall106 2 hours ago

7 comments

  • franky47 1 hour ago

        nasa employee: oh hey u guys are back early
        astronaut: moon's haunted
        nasa employee: what?
        astronaut: *loading a pistol and getting back on the rocket-ship* moon's haunted.
    
    https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/moons-haunted
  • throwawayffffas 42 minutes ago
    The soviets did regularly carry a gun. For survival purposes, as they were landing in Siberia which has wolves and pretty big bears.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TP-82

  • fsloth 20 minutes ago
    "The mortar package is activated by the "arm grenades" and "fire grenades" commands from Earth. The arm grenades command is applied to and gated through the command gating to the grenade arming circuitwhich charges the regulaz and sequential firing capacitors of the four grenades by applying a Z4-volt arming signal. A grenade arm pulse is also applied to the data handling function indicating receipt of the command."

    Page 2-170 (179 of the PDF) of reference [1].

    [0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19710014816 [1] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19710014816/downloads/19...

  • wongarsu 1 hour ago
    Now I'm wondering how far a regular military grenade launcher could lauch grenades on the moon
    • moritonal 1 hour ago
      About six times further with zero drag. So 3.6Km, or from Buckingham Palace to St Paul's Cathedral.
      • johannes1234321 1 hour ago
        Since there is no atmosphere even a bit further.
        • LoganDark 53 minutes ago
          That's already what zero drag meant
  • vconnor 1 hour ago
    > They were part of an active seismic imaging experiment

    That is what we call plausible deniability.

    (Everyone complaining about this topic inviting jokes, and I’m the first to have posted one. Drama sells more than silly jokes these days.)

    • aeonik 8 minutes ago
      I'm sure it's the literal truth.

      Never know when you need to seismically image some hostiles for scientific verification of threat elimination.

  • akmarinov 1 hour ago
    > Due to an influx of joke comments, all joke comments on this post will be deleted.

    And then they wonder why the whole group is dying

    • circularfoyers 1 hour ago
      The alternative to me seems to be becoming like a lot of subs on Reddit. It's part of why I like HN so much too, where the signal to noise is so much better.
      • tsunamifury 1 hour ago
        It’s not you’re just fooled but garbage people with false bravado.
        • cbg0 1 hour ago
          It actually is, on Reddit you need to collapse and scroll down a bit to get a real non-joke answer to something, over here low effort jokes tend to get pushed down.
          • jflessau 1 hour ago
            Agree. I’m here because discussions are not padded left and right with memes and people trying to farm karma with humor tailored for maximum engagement.
      • tiborsaas 27 minutes ago
        Yet, Reddit is alive and SE is... "struggling". Good jokes also carry information, that's why they work.
    • whycombilater 0 minutes ago
      Maybe they are courting the AI agent demographic...
    • dspillett 1 hour ago
      Nicely editorialised there, skipping the second half:

      > However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!

      On HN many purely jokey comments are often discouraged, being down-voted and getting replies along the lines of "this isn't Reddit". Is HN dying, by the same measure?

    • abbadadda 1 hour ago
      I was going to say the same. They did follow up with “However, we would appreciate your sense of humor in chat if you want to drop by!” but the bolded comment above significantly outweighs this.

      At least this earlier comment was deemed relevant and not too jokey:

      > Even more fun, Apollo 14 didn't use their grenades, and they are still on the lunar surface.

      • realusername 1 hour ago
        At least here it's jokes, sometimes they ask people to put valuable comments inside the chat, which is of course not publicly accessible so it's lost
    • tornikeo 25 minutes ago
      Curious, I checked that person's homepage. Looks about right for the 'no fun allowed' attitude:

      https://called2voyage.github.io/

    • wiseowise 1 hour ago
      God forbid resource doesn’t turn into a group rewarding regurgitated jokes for internet points, it would insane. Every time I read some serious (ughhrr) book, I write trite irony on margins because I can’t process information like a normal human being anymore without turning everything into shit.