Star City and the Baikonur Cosmodrome

First time accepted submitter zyborg writes "Here's 44 photographs of the Baikonour Cosmodrome used by the ISS program. The pictures range from training, launch vehicle transport and assembly, launch, touchdown, pictures from space, etc. From the article 'Earlier today, a Soyuz-FG rocket lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, carrying an International Space Station (ISS) crew into orbit. Baikonur, Russia's primary space launch facility since the 1950s, is the largest in the world, and supports multiple launches of both manned and unmanned rockets every year. With the U.S. manned space program currently on hold, Baikonur is now the sole launching point for trips to the ISS. Gathered here is a look at the facility, some of the cosmonaut training programs in Star City outside of Moscow, and a few recent launches and landings — plus a bonus: 3 spectacular long-exposure images of Earth from the ISS.'"

Comments

live launch tours from $5000 to $20000

[peter303]

I've seen various tours offered in Europe and from American science institutions. Here is an upcoming one. They let you get closer to the vehicles and the launch than does NASA.

Cold War

[darioushfaunk]

I'm still incredible impressed that Russia continues to support any type of Space industry, with infrastructure that looks like it hasn't changed much since the Cold War. I wonder how they afford it, and what their budget is for these projects...

Re:Cold War

[crazyjj]

And with a much better safety record than NASA, no less.

Re:Cold War

[Grishnakh]

I think you've already answered your own question. If you don't change your infrastructure much, there's not so much to afford, as it's already mostly paid for; you just have to pay for ongoing operational costs.

And selling pricey tours of everything probably helps with the budget too. The Russians are proving to be much better capitalists than the Americans.

Re:Cold War

[TWX]

The shuttle as promised and the shuttle as delivered were not the same craft. The original idea was that it was a rocket-assist plane that could land and be turned around to fly again in a matter of days or weeks, and that shuttles would be constantly flying, likely more than one mission at a time.

There have also been discussions that American military/industrial/aerospace developments weren't really because we wanted to push the boundaries of what we could do, but that we wanted to get the Russians to try to do something that they couldn't afford. If you look at the idea of defensive platforms in space, coupled with the shuttle, the aerial laser, and other ideas, you have an extremely expensive set of tech to develop. Not so expensive that the US couldn't afford to expend resources in those directions, but that possibly the Russians couldn't but would try anyway, ultimately breaking their own economy in the process. Given the way the Soviet Union broke up, it arguably worked.

Re:Cold War

[k6mfw]

Remember, the Soyuz has been flying since, what?, 1970?

1967 was first flight which ended in a fatality, Komarov flew Soyuz 1 almost got stuck in orbit but managed to deorbit but parachute malfunctioned. It is still hotly discussed as that flight was pushed ahead by Politburo, basically management wanted to go ahead while the engineers wanted more preparation time. Then a later flight (1970?) after highly successful space station visit, three cosmonauts died when Soyuz accidently depressurized during re-entry (or seperation from the Saylut), they were not wearing pressure suits. Bad start in its early days but Soyuz has done quite well in spite of couple launch vehicle aborts and a few ballistic entries. All things considered Soyuz outlived Apollo, Shuttle, and probably Orion as well.

Re:Cold War

[fusiongyro]

They work equally well, but only one of them extends your life and reduces your stress level.

Re:Cold War

[rs79]

It's fucking space. It's gonna be hard and people are gonna die. That's why it's called "exploration" not "a vacation".

Look on the bright side. They both have a better safety record that Star Trek.

interesting pics

[k6mfw]

Little while ago I talked with someone who had opportunity to sit inside a Soyuz, he is a tall guy and barely fit in the entry seat. Someone else mentioned they sit in beanbags like in the 1960s as not sure orientation vehicle will hit the ground. On Dennis Tito's flight, retros fired close to ground (as they should) but capsule was more horizontal due to parachute swing (shouldn't be like that) so capsule hit ground in not so much of a soft landing (so I was told). Also heard they pack firearms (and cosmonaut training includes firearms training) as cannot guarentee they will land in a friendly country (and even in Russia there are areas of where bandits rule).

Other than that, interesting collection of pictures. I was thinking they could hire some people to clean up rusty scraps of metal scattered about (or maybe they are all broke and still a miracle Russia has a space program).

Re:interesting pics

[shutdown -p now]

Also heard they pack firearms (and cosmonaut training includes firearms training) as cannot guarentee they will land in a friendly country (and even in Russia there are areas of where bandits rule).

As usual, the reality is much more mundane. They pack firearms because they can land into miles and miles of wilderness, which on a lot of Russian territory means dangerous fauna such as wolves, boars and brown bears. Hence why the gun they've originally used - TP-82 - was a typical "survival gun": double-barreled small caliber shotgun combined with a single barrel 5.45x39; a lot like the American M6 survival carbine used by USAF for similar reasons.

Apparently, it was introduced after the Voskhod 2 messed-up landing - they missed their projected landing point by almost 400 km, ended up in taiga in the middle of Urals, and had to wait for a day before the rescue parties have located them and managed to get helicopters through bad weather. When Leonov got back, he complained that they could really use some decent firearms onboard for situations like that.

Obsolete Saturday, 04:55 EDT

[bill_mcgonigle]

There's not much that can drag my ass out of bed at 5AM on a Saturday, but the first launch of Space Age 2.0 rises to that level.

And taken as a percentage of total space presence?

[SmallFurryCreature]

The Shuttle only stayed up for a few days, the Russians had permanent presence for year after year.

Oh and launches? The Russians never stopped their and still going. The Americans are begging for rides.

Steve Jobs did not have a reality distortion field, he was just an American in America.

More photos of Baikonur

[Elrond, Duke of URL]

My gallery on my university/work machine has a great collection of albums documenting a trip to Baikonur and the Cosmodrome. They were taken by Chuck, a friend of mine and retired engineer, during his trip there for the launch of ECHO. This was an AmSat (amateur radio) relay satellite. He took a great deal of photos covering the flights, the locations, the integration and launch of the satellite, and some other interesting places in Baikonur.

ECHO Launch Campaign

I also had a satellite launched from the Cosmodrome. I worked on the University of Arizona's Cubesat Project and wrote all of the onboard code controlling the satellite. In the end we built four satellites, three of which were completely functional. There was RinconSat 1 and 2, AlcatelSat, and an engineering model. The cubesats are small 10cm cubic satellites with a control/computer board, power board, radio board, an array of 24 sensors, and an array of solar panels on the outside frame.

The hardware was quite simple, but we didn't need anything super fancy. The computer board had a PIC microcontroller and using the I2C bus could communicate with two 32 kB FRAM (ferromagnetic RAM) storage chips, a clock chip (which kept time in binary coded decimal), and the sensors. Unfortunately, at the time there were no FOSS PIC compilers so we had to use a Windows/DOS/command line compiler which was really lousy, but we managed to work around the bugs as we found them.

I was very happy with our final results. We did a great deal of testing on the ground and did radio testing by taking the satellite up to the top of a nearby mountain and then communicating with it from our groundstation. The onboard code supported one- and two-way communication and had several modes of operation. It had a default mode in case communication could not be established, a real-time mode that would broadcast a constant stream of sensor readings for a period of time while the satellite was overhead, and a regular mode that would collect readings based on a schedule and store them in the FRAM storage which you could then later command the satellite to transmit to you.

After many delays, we finally got a launch opportunity. We sent RinconSat 2 and AlcatelSat to CalPoly where they were integrated with other cubesats into the launch mechanism. They then sent them to the Baikonur Cosmodrome for the launch. At first, everything seemed to be going well, but we soon found out that it was far from well. The first stage of the rocket failed to separate and the rocket crashed 70 km downrange in a flaming crater, destroying all of the cubesats as well as the far more expensive primary payload (some sort of communications satellite). Sigh...

We don't have any sort of web site, sadly, but one of these days I need to gather up all the photos, documents, source code, and other random stuff I still have access to and make a nice web page for our late satellites.