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Kazakhstan's Spaceship Junkyard

Posted by Zonk on from the mos-eisley dept.

Richard W.M. Jones writes "What happens to the booster stages of rockets? They fall back to earth, and in most cases into the oceans. But not in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, where the first stages fall over populated farmland. The locals have become rich dealing in the titanium-rich scrap metal as this article and this remarkable photo essay show. So far the only casualties seem to have been a few dead cows."

8 of 307 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like... by TheKidWho · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The junkers from Asimov's stories =)

  2. Re:just wait by Frumious+Wombat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Since these parts start on earth, you're not going to catch anything that the flight control team doesn't already have. Frankly, Skylab fell on the aussies, and nobody there caught any extraterrestrial bug that anybody outside Oz noticed.

    Since the article is slashdotted, I hope they at least take care to plot where the villages are, before letting parts fall everywhere.

    I wonder what Borat has to say about this?

    --
    the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken
  3. Slashdotted, already by mcrbids · · Score: 2, Interesting

    4 comments as I view, and it's down.

    How's this for the ultimate conundrum: the combination of "Nobody RTFA here" and "the Slashdot Effect" taking down sites?

    Maybe some people actually DO RTFA besides myself?

    (sigh

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  4. In soviet russia, waste manages you! by ElGanzoLoco · · Score: 4, Interesting

    7 replies and photo essay is already slow as hell...

    Ex-Soviet Russia is famous for *not* managing its nuclear waste (hundreds of nuclear submarines slowly rotting away in Barents Sea, pissing off Finns and Swedes) ; nuclear weapons out of hand or simply "missing" ; some famous fuckups (Tchernobyl; that bio-warfare incident about 20 years ago, when a lab leaked a killer virus over a village) ; etc...

    So nobody should be surprised that they let booster rockets fall on populated areas...

    --
    Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
  5. What killed the cows? by NanoGator · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I realize there are obvious answers (toxic fuel, fire, etc...) but I'm often surprised when asking these questions.

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  6. I liked Kazakhstan by peter+hoffman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I went to Almaty (aka "Alma Ata", the old capital of Kazakhstan) back in about 1994. I really enjoyed it and found the people to be very friendly and enthusiastic.

    I did find the food to be somewhat unique. Breakfast was usually a kind of roll filled with either finely chopped vegetables and/or finely ground meat. I don't know what sort of meat it was and it wasn't even always clear which buns had meat as everything was so finely ground up. It was all tasty though.

    Lunch was fairly straight forward but the dessert was a peculiar electric green sweet foam. I couldn't identify the flavor but it was also pretty good.

    Supper was quite interesting as, although the menu had a variety of items, it turned out what was actually available was either steak or spaghetti. No worry though, both were quite good as was the company!

    The architecture, furnishings, and decor of Almaty were very interesting. For me, it was like an instant trip to the 1950s but in a parallel universe where everything was slightly unfamiliar.

    The name of the hotel I stayed at escapes me right now but it was something like "The Cosmo". I think it has been renamed "Kazakhstan Hotel" based on the pictures I can find. There was a very impressive and very large tapestry commemorating the Soviet space program in the lobby.

    The main thing about my trip was my time in Kazakhstan was far too short. It took ~48 hours to get there, I had ~48 hours there, and then it was ~48 hours to come home. I wish I had time to visit Baikonur Cosmodrome (we were invited to visit by our hosts) but we didn't have time. I'll always regret that.

    Anyway, if you get a chance to go to Kazakhstan, you really should take it.

    1. Re:I liked Kazakhstan by peter+hoffman · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I was there as part of a team from ICL (now part of Fujitsu) presenting some banking software to a group of about a dozen different banks. I was responsible for the technical end of the presentation (i.e., make sure the all the hardware / software / networking functioned properly) and to answer any technical questions the banks might have.

      Most of the other Westerners I met as a result of this trip were there because of oil and other mineral interests. This was relatively soon after Kazakhstan had become independent and the Kazakhs were very interested in development and self-sufficiency.

      I didn't see any sign of a McDonald's or other Western storefront while I was there but my time there was limited and there was a lot I didn't see. Almaty is quite a large city, somewhat reminiscent of Denver, so I didn't see most of it.

      Almaty is right next to some large mountains and although our hotel was definitely in the city, there was a ski-lift only a few blocks away that would take you up the side of the mountains. It couldn't be more convenient for visitors to go skiing for the afternoon.

      I would love the opportunity to go back there. The countries in that part of the world (the "stans") and their people are often portrayed negatively. I just wanted to let the people here at Slashdot, who probably haven't had a chance to visit KZ, know that it is very much worth doing.

      There is a website at http://www.almadf.kz.nyud.net:8090/english/index.h tml that I found this morning which has a lot of photos showing how beautiful Almaty and its people are. I have no connection with that site and I have tried to avoid having it Slashdotted by using using Coral. Therefore I inserted ".nyud.net:8090" into the actual URL above.

      I would like to know if there are there are any people from Kazakhstan reading Slashdot? I would have thought there should be. If you are from Kazakhstan and would like to make a friend in the U.S., please feel free to contact me at mailto:southcarolina1860-kazakhstan@yahoo.com

  7. Re:Titanium is a pain to weld or melt in the house by quacking+duck · · Score: 2, Interesting
    more jewelry is being made of titanium

    A couple friends recently got engaged, and they had an artisan who specialized in jewelry design and make her engagement ring.

    Of all the exotic materials they can make rings out of, one thing she would not do was make rings out of titanium. The reason? In case of certain medical emergencies (snagged in a machine, or crashed car, or whatever), they'd need to cut the ring off to free the finger (and ultimately the entire person). But no paramedic or even hospital ward is routinely equipped with tools to cut through titanium. If they encountered a titanium ring in a time-critical emergency, they could well be forced to cut the finger off instead.