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.'"

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

[tverbeek]

The Soviet/Russian space program's safety record isn't all that great either. They've also had two in-flight accidents that resulted in the loss of all hands (but with crews of only 1 and 3, so a smaller body count). Taken as a percentage of launches, this gives them about the same failure rate as NASA.

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]

And, you could argue that the Soviet's space shuttle was superior to ours (USA). I remember watching a documentary on it and it's first flight was completely computer controlled.

And it also depressurized and had it been manned, the crew would have been killed.

It might have had some additional technology that ours lacked, but initially our shuttles all flew. Modifying from initial design parameters (ie, launching when too cold, removing the latex coating from the external fuel tank) is what killed our crews, and ultimately confidence in the program.

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 [arizona.edu]

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.