available here.

It could have been a lot worse for the two Americans and one Russian whose landing ended up nearly 300 miles off course and their recovery hours late.



In 1976, a Soyuz spacecraft came down in a freezing squall and splashed into a lake; the crew spent the night bobbing in the capsule.

Eleven years before that, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 2,000 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That's when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft.



In a situation like that, a shotgun could prove useful. Not only might it help you prevent yourself from being eaten, it can help kill some food. Sounds like a good piece of survival gear so long as the shells are carefully packed. An accidental discharge inside the capsule would be very unpleasant.

I doubt any firearms are carried on the Shuttle. The chances of it coming down (and the crew surviving) so far off course are rather remote. I'm pretty sure the astronauts still undergo survival training but probably not to the extent they did in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo days.