Slashdot Mirror
Kazakhstan's Spaceship Junkyard
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."
So that's how cattle mutilations happen!
I predict that the server will go down like the boosters. First, heating up, then, burning up, and finally, nothing but scrap metal.
Sucks to be a cow ...
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Needs about 1,668 degrees Celsius to melt. That's all they can do with it...sell it. I can vouch for one thing, more jewelry is being made of titanium. Strange choice, but consider that 1,000 years ago aluminum was a hundred times more valuable than gold. I melt aluminum into ingots to save when I complete a mold for a tool I need to build. That's the only way to be certain somthing is made in America today, it seems. More power to Our Kazakhstan neighbors.
without prejudice
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!
Rocket hitting your barn full of cows, sheep, and Soviet Bloc farm equipment - 677912345234621 Rubles (roughly $20 US). Reselling the rocket to random scrap metal dealers - priceless, or at least 76790823485724429234 rubles (roughly $45 US).
Coral cache due to /.ing:t s/culture/articles/photo_pages/essay_proj2.cfm?ser ies=sj&ID=1&max=12&ss=off
http://www.eurasianet.org.nyud.net:8090/departmen
That's ridiculous. A much more stereotypical response in the US would be for NASA to pay the family 200% of the value of what they lost, and the scrupulous family would still insist on suing for additional millions for the "emotional damage" resultant from the loss of their goldfish. The subsequent increase in insurance costs would push commercialization of space back a decade or two.
That's not a story, it's seven sentences.
/. has posted stories based off nothing but a "my sister's boyfriend's best friend's uncle's janitor's hairdress told him that some unknown Microsoft VP told the guy in the stall next to him..."
Of course,
"And if it killed someone, they could just sell the titanium, and it would be OK, right?"
I don't know... how much titanium is there in a human body?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
One cow was almost killed by a direct impact, but managed to pull through after weeks of intensive care.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Even funnier, I read the article about the mutant Chernobyl children and the in-page-advert was from Microsoft and included dinosaured headed people in shirts-and-tie talking around the office. I thought it was a spoof article at first with pictures of Godzilla like kids ;)
"That is not dead which can eternal lie...."
Nimheil
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.
http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~64ndhi/SlashdotKazakh stan/
Counter we contacted our local hospital emergency room and asked if they were equipped to cut off a titanium ring in an emergency. Most hospital emergency rooms are prepared to handle almost anything, and ours assured us that it would be no problem for them. During our 30+ years of jewelry repair experience, we've only seen a dozen or so rings that have been cut off in hospital emergency rooms, and in most of those cases the rings had been bent out-of-round and were putting painful pressure on the finger. Titanium rings are less likely to crush or bend out-of-round, so if you shut your hand in a car door or drop a heavy object on it, it might be safer to be wearing a titanium ring than a precious metal band!
Counter 2 In case of an emergency, such as an injured finger, Emergency Medical Technicians, Fire Departments, and Hospital Emergency Rooms can quickly remove titanium rings. Several non-destructive methods for ring removal are available before resorting to cutting a ring. In the rare event it becomes necessary to cut off a titanium ring, emergency medical professionals carry ring cutters or rotary cut-off tools that cut through metals, including our CP and Aerospace Grade Titanium. In our testing, we found that tools that will cut through steel will also cut through titanium rings.
Counter 3 Titanium rings are created with safety in mind, as there is always the possibility that a ring will need to be removed in an emergency. Tests by various manufacturers have shown that titanium rings can be manually cut with a ring cutter within a matter of minutes, and much faster using an electric ring cutting device, such as those that many paramedics use.
Counter 4 I had heard that there is a "medical emergency" issue (i.e. they can't cut the ring off of your finger with regular ring snippers) but my friend's hubby, who is an EMT, assured me that this isn't something to be concerned about, since they have different types of cutters they can use should the need arise.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
but consider that 1,000 years ago aluminum was a hundred times more valuable than gold
Aluminum was not known as a metal 1,000 years ago, having been discovered in 1825 and purified enough to really test its properties in 1827. But yes, until the electolytic process was developed in 1886, it was quite vaulable because it was so hard to purify.
(There were, in fact, only seven pure metals known a thousand years ago -- iron, copper, tin, gold, silver, lead, and mercury. The isolation of zinc and its recognition as a metal dates to c.1200 AD in India, and arsenic was isolated around that time in Europe.)