Truck driver killed in fire related to crash of Soyuz stage in Kazakhstan
A truck driver has died in an effort to extinguish a fire related to the crash in Kazakhstan of the stages from the Soyuz rocket that earlier this week launched a Progress freighter to ISS.
This story does not indicate any failure on Russia’s part during the launch. What it does highlight is the problematic location of their Baikonur spaceport, which requires expendable first stages to crash on land. In fact, this incident also suggests it wise for the Russians, and the Kazakhstans, to consider developing recoverable first stages that can land in a controlled manner, as SpaceX has, in order to make this spaceport more useful and safer.
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A truck driver has died in an effort to extinguish a fire related to the crash in Kazakhstan of the stages from the Soyuz rocket that earlier this week launched a Progress freighter to ISS.
This story does not indicate any failure on Russia’s part during the launch. What it does highlight is the problematic location of their Baikonur spaceport, which requires expendable first stages to crash on land. In fact, this incident also suggests it wise for the Russians, and the Kazakhstans, to consider developing recoverable first stages that can land in a controlled manner, as SpaceX has, in order to make this spaceport more useful and safer.
Readers!
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. Your support allows me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Only now does it appear that Washington might finally recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Or if they could finally get past all the corruption and actually open the Vostochny space port… Have we crossed the decade threshold yet?
Maybe this has happened routinely during the 50 years that the Korolov Cross (the four Soyuz boosters separating visually from the ground) has been dropped from the 1,000 launches made. Starting fires and killing people trying to extinguish it. Without anyone hearing about it before. Maybe.
I tend to think that this might be an insurance fraud local to Zhezkazgan.
There’s this flow of strange space news from Russia and the inner parts of its former empire, like Kazakhstan. And it has always been like this. It’s not part of any other fake news epidemic. Plankton on the ISS. Satellites crashing down through the roofs of homes on “Kosmonaut Street”. There’s a whole mythology about spaceflight over there. There’s a culture of publishing what people want to read. Because it’s fun to make fun of others. Only politicians turn out to not be very fun to make fun of in the end.
The family of this poor guy makes up that he was fighting a space launch related fire. Maybe because they hope to get some compensation from the government, or just because they really believe that he was a born saint who can’t fail. I read Russian (and Borat/Kazak) news like a comic book. Even what their president says. It’s neither as good, nor as bad, as it looks. Because it’s mostly just meant to be a practical joke. Or some kind of insurance fraud.
LocalFluff–
totally agree with your thought–
“… flow of strange space news from Russia and the inner parts of its former empire,”
(can’t speak to your other points)
I’m not into ‘strange space news,’ as-such, but, (I know more than I should… I have noticed an inordinate amount of it flowing from that part of the World, in the past 10 years or so.
Don’t know if it’s KGB psy-op’s or some cultural thing about Space, UFO’s, and that-sorta-stuff.
(We haven’t had a good UFO-Craze, in many years, State side.)
I am lead to believe–huge rate of auto insurance fraud [fraud in general?!!] does exist in Russia, necessitating everyone using Dash-Cam’s. (or is that an urban myth?)
That being said–
Bad idea to set the peasant’s on fire, with spent space-hardware. (At least the Coyote & Roadrunner, were out in the middle of the “West.”)
But seriously–
I was unaware their hardware falls on land at this location.
wayne
Stuff do rain from the sky after their launches, there’re images online. Russians have always been superstitious. They like UFO stuff. When their government spreads fake space news it is because the individual bureaucrats are superstitious, not because it’s planned from above. Crazy perceptions are mixed with crazy actual actions, so no one can know what craziness is actually true. They have this disinformation automatically from their culture, no conspiracy needed. I think it is old days’ farmers’ instincts that’s trying to apply itself to a non-farming lifestyle.
It should be very unlikely to be the victim of space debris in the almost uninhabited Kazak steppe.
LocalFluff-
Didn’t Harry Houdini perform for the Russian czar? (He made a church-bell ring, something like that… It’s from a recent movie on Houdini, which I can’t readily locate.) Rasputin was dumbfounded.
Tass, Pravda, RT, it’s all KGB. They invented fake-news so long ago, the Patent has expired.