Guns in Extreme Places: From Space to the Deep Sea

Guns turn up in places you’d never expect: strapped into a spacecraft, fired hundreds of feet underwater, or carried by law in the high Arctic. Engineers have bent the rules of physics to make firearms work where a normal gun simply can’t. Here are the wildest guns in extreme places, and a couple of famous space-gun myths busted along the way.

The Space Gun: TP-82 Cosmonaut Pistol

Soviet and Russian cosmonauts really did fly with a gun, just not for orbit. The TOZ TP-82 rode in the Soyuz survival kit from 1986 to 2007 in case the capsule landed far off course in the Siberian wilderness. It’s a triple-barrel beast: two smoothbore barrels fire shotshells or signal flares, a third rifled barrel fires a rifle round, and the detachable buttstock doubles as a machete. It was carried for a bear-and-wolves landing, never for a shootout in space.

The SPP-1 Underwater Pistol

A normal bullet dies within a few feet underwater, so the Soviets built the SPP-1 for their combat frogmen in 1975. It has four smoothbore barrels that fire long steel darts, stabilized by the water itself instead of rifling. Its range shrinks the deeper you go, from about 17 meters near the surface down to 6 meters at 40 meters deep. It’s a genuine underwater handgun, and it looks like something out of a spy film.

The APS Underwater Assault Rifle

The SPP-1’s big brother is the APS, a full-auto underwater rifle for Spetsnaz divers. It fires a five-inch steel bolt that travels inside a bubble of air it creates, a trick called supercavitation that slashes drag. It holds 26 darts and can punch through a diver’s air tank at range. There’s even a modern amphibious version that switches between darts and standard rifle ammo so a frogman can fight from the sea onto the beach without swapping guns.

The Bang Stick

Not every underwater gun is high-tech. A powerhead, or “bang stick,” is just a firearm cartridge on the end of a pole that fires the instant you jam it against a shark or gator. It’s a contact weapon on purpose, because a normal bullet loses its punch almost immediately in water. Divers even waterproof the primer with a dab of nail polish. Crude, effective, and exactly the point.

The Svalbard Polar-Bear Rifle

On the Arctic islands of Svalbard, Norwegian rules require anyone leaving the settlements to carry effective protection against polar bears, which in practice means a large-bore rifle. With roughly 3,000 bears sharing the islands with about 2,500 people, it’s not paranoia. The twist: inside the town of Longyearbyen, carrying a loaded gun is forbidden. Load up to leave, unload to come home. A big-bore lever gun is a classic choice; see our best lever-action rifles guide.

The M6 Aircrew Survival Gun

Cold War bomber crews flew polar routes, so the Air Force gave them the M6, a folding .22 Hornet over .410 shotgun combo. Its cleverest feature is a big squeeze-bar trigger you can work while wearing heavy Arctic mittens, and the stock stored a handful of rifle and shotgun rounds for foraging after a bailout. It’s one of the great survival guns, born for the top of the world.

The Whaling Harpoon Cannon

For sheer scale, nothing beats the harpoon cannon. Bolted to a ship’s bow, it fires a heavy steel harpoon tipped with an explosive grenade that detonates deep inside a whale. Svend Foyn’s 1864 swivel-cannon design industrialized whaling almost overnight. It’s less a gun than a naval artillery piece aimed at the biggest targets on Earth.

The Alaska Bear Gun

Closer to home, the extreme environment is the Alaskan bush, and the tool is the big-bore lever gun. A short-barreled Marlin 1895 in .45-70, the classic “Guide Gun,” is the go-to for stopping a charging brown bear at spitting distance. Bush pilots, guides, and backcountry travelers carry it because it’s fast-handling and hits like a truck up close. If you spend time in bear country, our .44 Magnum revolvers guide covers the handgun side of the same job.

Two Space-Gun Myths, Busted

Two things everyone gets wrong. First, no astronaut ever carried a gun to the Moon, and nobody has fired one in space. Firearms were ruled out partly because spacecraft run oxygen-rich, where a propellant discharge is a hazard. The only space program guns were survival tools for after you landed back on Earth. Second, cosmonauts aren’t packing that famous triple-barrel today. The TP-82 was retired around 2007 when its special ammo aged out, replaced by an ordinary pistol in the kit. And remember, polar bears live only in the Arctic, so those legal gun requirements are a Svalbard thing, never an Antarctic one.