I'm reading Starman - The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin, and they're talking about Baikonur, and I realized that this is where our astronauts are catching their rides to the ISS (International Space Station). Baikonur is in Kazakhstan, which isn't even part of the USSR anymore. The Russians lease the place. Desolate does not even begin to describe the landscape. I do a little Googling and I find this U2 photo of a launch pad from 1957 on Wikipedia.
I look the place up on Google Maps, and after a bit of poking around (the place it really big), I find the same launch pad, orientation is different, and there are more buildings, but it's the same place.
This video contains some scenes similar to the photos I posted in Part 1. I like the way they only show short segments of things is motion. The segments are long enough to show how slowly things are moving, but not so long as to become tedious. If they showed the entire process we would be here till next Tuesday.
Cape Canaveral, Florida, September 21, 2014. SpaceX's Falcon 9 lifts off early carrying the Dragon CRS4 to the International Space Station (ISS) (AFP Photo/Bruce Weaver)
Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, Sept. 23, 2014. Russia's Soyuz-FG booster rocket with the space capsule Soyuz TMA-14M that will carry a new crew to the International Space Station (ISS) is transported from hangar to the launch pad. U.S. astronaut Barry Wilmore, and Russian cosmonauts Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova are the next crew scheduled to travel to the International Space Station on September 26. (AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin)
Hearing about all the excitement in places like the Ukraine, Syria and Iraq, and then seeing things like this make me wonder what our fearless leaders are thinking. Then again, maybe I should be wondering just who is pulling the strings. Compared to world wide oil production, all the space programs in the world don't amount to a hill of beans. So I guess we should be glad we are still on speaking terms with Putin. We are, aren't we?
Dominik Sky - Human Flag on 360 meters (1181 feet) HD
I don't much care for videos of people engaging in foolish, dangerous actions. Plus they make my hands sweat. This guy is hanging off the top of the chimney at the Trbovlje Power Station in Slovenia, the tallest in Europe.
A rocket carrying the Olympic torch successfully blasted off from the Russian-operated Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early on Thursday, ahead of the Sochi 2014 Winter Games. The Russian rocket also carried three astronauts to the International Space Station. Later on Thursday, NASA reported a flawless docking with the space station about six hours after it left Kazakhstan. The unlit torch for the 2014 Winter Olympics in the Russian city of Sochi is to be taken on a spacewalk on Saturday, then return to Earth on Monday with three departing space station astronauts.
We are certainly getting blase about sending men into space, aren't we? The only thing amazing about this video is that I managed to catch it on the day it was released. The bit about the torch is a little silly, but harmless and probably catches the attention of a couple more percentage points of the viewing audience than it would otherwise. What would have been really amazing is if they took a lit torch on the space walk and it stayed lit. Well, maybe not, being rocket scientists they could provide it with its own oxygen supply.
Did you notice the way the launch tower rotated on its base? Didn't know they could do that.
I am wondering how long it will be before Zelensky is crushed like the bug he is. I expect he will wait until Russian tanks are rolling down his street before he decides to take the Zelenion dollars he has stuffed into his pockets and bolt for the exit. I don't expect him to stand his ground and wait for the hammer of doom, but one can only hope.
Launchpad Water Sound Suppression System Tested for Ares
You know all that water they dump on the launch platform when a rocket takes off? Seems it reduces the amount of noise from the rocket engines reflected back at the rocket, specifically the space shuttle. The shuttle engines made so much noise it actually inflicted some damage on the SRB-s (Solid Rocket Boosters). Minor damage, but still, not something you want to happen. NASA has a page about it.
The water also helps reduce the amount of damage that the rocket blast inflicts on the launch platform. Stack Exchange explains why the Russians launch their missiles over a pit:
"Russians for the Soyuz boosters have an interesting approach that does
not use water suppression, since Baikanour is often experiencing winter
when they wish to launch, when flowing water won't work so well (and
snow is not as effective as water for this task). They basically suspend
the booster over the edge of a cliff, so that the exhaust goes down,
and then out a vent, such that there is not much infrastructure directly
below it to be damaged."
I had never heard of the 'Sound Suppression' angle before. I thought it was all about ameliorating blast damage. Huh. Learn something new every day. Previous posts about Baikonur.
The Russians took off today, and since I am half a world away from the launch site, they are probably already on board the ISS. Tom Cruise is also planning to launch into orbit this month.
Salyut 7 - The forgotten rescue of a dead space station
Curious Droid
Update two days later. Just realized that the trailer won't play, so I replaced it with the movie, or part of it anyway. Wikipedia says the movie is two hours long, this video is only 40 minutes. It's in Russian, but you can enable the subtitles by clicking on the cc icon in status bar along the bottom. Well, that will give you subtitles, but they will be in Russian. To get the English ones, you need to click on the settings icon (the one that looks like a flower or a swollen asterisk), and then follow the menu a couple of levels down until you get to English.
Update August 2024 replaced video with shorter one from Curious Droid. The Russian one is out there, but no English.
You may have heard about the riots in Kazakhstan and how they were promptly squashed. You may have thought, like I did, that it was entirely an internal matter. The price of fuel shot up when the president stopped subsidizing it. That might trigger a protest that could turn into a riot. But now we have a story from Pepe Escobar telling us that the unrest was fomented by outside forces, namely the Brits and Turkey. If the Brits are involved can the CIA be far behind? What baffles me is what they hope to achieve. I suppose they could be trying to gain some temporary advantage in the petroleum marketplace that would allow them to make a couple extra zillion dollars. That seems foolish since there seems to be an insatiable demand for fuel. Given the CIA's history of shit stirring all over the world, I wouldn't be surprised to find out they were involved. And I wouldn't be surprised if Biden didn't know anything about it. Then again I wouldn't be surprised to find that he engineered the whole thing. I mean the whole US opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is to make sure that transit fees keep being paid to Ukraine. Wretched vultures.
I watchedthe movie Dune this week. This is the first of the pair of recent movies. I've read the book and I've seen an earlier movie version, but I'm watching this movie and it's nothing like I remember. Oh, I remember some of the characters, but I remember this story being a science fiction thriller, and this movie wasn't that at all. This time the thing that struck me is that the Atreides family packs up their entire company, including their army and their families and all their associated baggage and moves to the most hostile planet in the universe. Okay, on an absolute scale it's not all that hostile, it's got gravity similar to Earth and breathable air, but when you look at it using a human scale, the place is inimical to human life. It's covered with sand. The sun will fry you, the sandstorms will strip the flesh from your bones, and if that's not enough there are giant worms that will swallow you whole. Hell might be a better name for this planet than Arrakis. You would have to be a very loyal follower of the Emperor to accept an appointment to Dune.
But you think about it for a minute and Dune really sounds a whole lot Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Very hot, unpleasant places covered with sand, governed by tyrants, but we still have people willing to pack up everything and move there, and the reason is the same: money. On Dune, it's the spice. In the Mideast, it's oil.
The area shown is about 900 miles across, so the mine is at the edge of the desert. The Caspian Sea is at the left hand side of the map and what used to be the Aral Sea is the greenish-white blob near the top center. The Baikonur Cosmodrome is about half way between the mine and the Aral Sea.
What I didn't find is whether the Kazatomprom (the Kazakhstan uranimum mining operation) is enriching uranium, which is what you need to do if you want to use the uranium for anything besides being dense. This led me to Wikipedia's page aboutEnriched uranium, which was a real eye-opener. Seems the whiz kids have busy cooking up any number of techniques for enriching uranium. There is gaseous diffusion that was used at Oak Ridge during WW2. Then we have second generation gaseous diffusion that uses high speed centrifuges that is many times more efficient. This is the one Iran was using when somebody (Israel?) hacked their centrifuges and caused them to speed up to the point where they destroyed themselves. And that's just the start. People are working on plethora of techniques involving chemistry, lasers and microstructures.
Kazakhstan, Nov. 21, 2014. Russia's Soyuz-FG booster rocket with the space capsule Soyuz TMA-15M that will carry a new crew to the International Space Station (ISS), being prepared for launch at the pad in Russian leased Baikonur cosmodrome. Start of the new Soyuz mission is scheduled on Monday, Nov.24.(AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)
