A closer look
Russian Soyuz space capsules were routinely equipped with a specialized triple-barreled survival shotgun designed to fend off angry bears upon landing in the remote Siberian wilderness. Since their spacecraft often drifted drastically off course during reentry, cosmonauts frequently found themselves crash-landing in the middle of hostile, frozen forests instead of designated recovery zones. Waiting for rescue meant sitting in a tiny metal sphere while massive predators investigated the freshly roasted smell coming from the heat shield. So, the Soviet space program casually handed their elite scientists a custom firearm that could shoot rifle bullets, shotgun shells, and flares, just in case their grand return from the cosmos ended with them being eaten by a hungry grizzly. It is deeply amusing that humanity can engineer a vessel to successfully orbit the planet, only to immediately revert to frontier cowboy tactics the second gravity kicks back in
