Question New Astronaut Survival Weapons?

A recent post by @Burbank Rob (found here) asking about the possibility of martian astronaut-arms got me thinking: what about the ISS? IIRC. guns were issued to cosmonauts for surviving after they landed, but before they're found. The Boeing Starliner won't splashdown like the Crew Dragon, it will perform landings.

So will astronauts assigned to a Starliner be issued survival equipment? And if not, then why?
 

Today I learned that survival weapons were given to crews who perform splashdowns instead of land.

So what is it about the "modern world" that made us stop? Was it never really important, or did we get faster at finding the astronauts?
 

COLGeek

Cybernaut
Moderator
Today I learned that survival weapons were given to crews who perform splashdowns instead of land.

So what is it about the "modern world" that made us stop? Was it never really important, or did we get faster at finding the astronauts?
Yes, given our tracking technology and ability to get places faster, I would think so.

I don't see survivors being alone on the ground long enough for a bullet launcher.
 
Going off on a tangent, life is, itself, a survivalist energy weapon of mass destruction. To do without weapons is to do without life. To destroy all weapons is to destroy all life. We humans just happen to be the top dog energy weapon, that is, that we know of.

Genesis and Exodus in opening up the space frontier system, soonest, would be better! Life, we, are good at converting inanimate inert masses to animate life energies. Life is always energy-weaponizing inanimate inert masses, including stone-savage Utopias.
 
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There's always time for plinking. A gun without practice is only 1/2 of a weapon. Our first alien contact will probably be eaten.
If it doesn't try to eat us, first ('Hour of the Horde', by Gordon R. Dickson). And nature trying to eat us, even right here on the Earth, is far, far more usual that most people think.

Only the strong, including the strongest civilizations (the raw, alien, harsh and forbidding, tree-bark-like ringed to the outside, 'frontier' civilizations), survive.
 
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