Was a weapon carried aboard the Apollo 11 mission in case they met anything hostile?
No, they didn’t, though there was some concern about them bringing back harmful bacteria, unlikely as it seemed. Up until Apollo 14 astronauts were quarantined when they returned to Earth in case they had picked up some pathogen in space or on the Moon. And to correct some misinformation above, the oxygen in gunpowder is bound up in the powder. So not only would a gun work in a vacuum, it would be even deadlier because there would be no air to slow the bullet. Which brings up another point, an accidental gunshot in a space capsule could cripple or destroy the mission. Another excellent reason why NASA wouldn’t particularly want armed astronauts.
Apollos 8 and 10 went into lunar orbit before Apollo 11 and those astronauts got a very good view of the Moon. There were also plenty of photos from unmanned probes. The Russians photographed the far side of the Moon in 1959. If there had been hostile aliens on the Moon, they would have known. I doubt anyone at NASA was concerned about Armstrong and Aldrin encountering aliens on the Moon.
Ciaron D: LMAO! Asker: No, there was no other weapon aboard. Soviet capsules, OTOH, were equipped with shotguns, I believe, because there may have been bears where they landed. All of ours splashed down, so no bears. And nobody was the least bit worried about hostile alien beings, since those are so unlikely to exist. No weapon was needed.
>Was a weapon carried aboard the Apollo 11 mission in case they met anything hostile? No. It was already fairly well established that no native life forms or alien artifacts of any kind existed on the Moon. Besides, a gun would have constitutes a considerable amount of extra weight, and when you’re flying into space, you want to carry as little extra weight as you can. Of course, they took a golf club once, and they took some flags, so they COULD have taken a gun if they had really wanted to (and yes, it would have worked in space, since black powder has its own oxidizer), but they didn’t. >All we knew about the moon then was what we could see through a telescope a quarter million miles away on Earth. That’s not actually true. Both robotic and manned spacecraft had already been sent orbiting around the Moon, and had done extensive photography work on its surface. Robotic landers had also been landed on the Moon’s surface as early as 1966, and had sent back pictures of the surface, some
