After sending astronauts to space, the US realized their guillotines were useless. This was the 1960s—the height of the space race—so NASA spent an absurd amount of money to develop a guillotine that works in zero gravity. Rumored to cost at least $1 million (about $9 million in today’s dollars), the “space guillotine” can behead upside down, at extreme temperatures, and even underwater. This feat of American inventiveness allowed astronauts to be beheaded in space.
Faced with a similar problem, the Russians used a machete.