Kazakhstan is pretty large and Baikonur is located pretty far south with the bulk of the national territory to its north and east. So it would appear possible, from a strictly geographic standpoint, for reusable and partially-reusable rockets launched from Baikonur on most likely azimuths to land their first stages within the Kazakh borders without needing to do any boostback burns. This is important, as any necessity to land in Russian territory would render the whole idea a non-starter from the get-go.

But I don’t think the economics would work.

One cannot, for example, simply land large rocket stages at any given point in the Kazakh boonies. SpaceX does its RTLS landings on prepared pads. It is certainly possible to build comparable minimally-improved landing facilities in the Kazakh hinterlands, but one would need to build quite a few of them to accommodate varying azimuths for any given rocket type and still more if one also needed to accommodate the varying ballistics of different rocket types.

Kazakhstan, like Russia, is not blessed with particularly extensive or dense road and rail networks. I suspect it would be necessary to build out new access rights-of-way to at least some of the potential landing pad locations – perhaps even most. That’s a lot of infrastructure expense, especially given that such notional roads and rail routes would need to be engineered to allow transport of vary large and heavy objects. Given how few annual landings any particular such landing pad would likely see, I don’t see such a scheme ever being economically viable.

The SpaceX drone ships are few in number but are able to accommodate widely varying launch azimuths by simply taking up station at different points in the relevant oceans. They are also kept pretty much continually busy these days so their capital and fixed expenses are amortized over a lot of annual missions.

Variable costs are modest compared to rail or truck transit as well. For transport of bulk commodities, seaborne logistics are far cheaper, per ton, than rail or truck. Large rocket stages are not a classic bulk commodity such as oil, coal or grain, but they are bulky commodities so the general rule still applies.

Then, of course, there is the matter of that bulkiness anent rail or highway transport. Falcon 9’s design is optimized for long-distance US road transport but Kazakh roads may not be as accommodating. For rail transport, the problem tends to be more with length of big rocket stages than girth In the US, this problem was infamously responsible for the decision to use segmented, rather than unitary, SRBs on the Space Shuttle.

So, an interesting idea you had there, but I don’t think it pencils out.

Jeff Wright,

Not really “perfect” as I discuss above.

And I don’t foresee any Starship ops out of Baikonur on any reasonably foreseeable timeframe. Right now, SpaceX launches Starships about two miles away from where they are built at Starbase. A second, even larger, production facility is planed to support Starship operations at Kennedy-Canaveral. Until the second factory is able to start production, the Kennedy-Canaveral Starship launch/landing infrastructure is to be served by Super Heavy and Starship stages built at Starbase and transported to Kennedy-Canaveral by barge. Barge transport to Baikonur is impossible.

It would be physically possible to build Starship catch facilities at Baikonur and transport Starships there via suborbital ballistic flights, but the same does not look to be straightforwardly true for Super Heavy booster stages – without which, of course, the whole scheme comes to naught.

And those are just the physical limitations. The legal ones would be entirely insuperable at present. ITAR rules out the building, by US-chartered companies, of any “munitions” production facility outside US borders except in sharply limited circumstances. It also prohibits the export of any such “munitions” absent quite stringent restrictions on the notional destination country. I don’t see Kazakhstan being such a permissible place so long as Russia is still around and hostile to the West. Too close.

So, another interesting idea that just doesn’t pencil out.

Cloudy,

Given Ukraine’s demonstrated cleverness in coming up with ever more ways to savage the Russians at long range, Russia’s size is not really helping it. Operation Spider’s Web, in particular, was not only promptly devastating to Russian strategic airpower, but has manifested knock-on effects that will hobble Russia going forward. Foremost among these was Russia’s subsequent logistics snarl-up caused by frequent inspections of every long-haul truck in Russia. The follow-on attack that used rail cars loaded with drones to wipe out an entire freight train carrying armored vehicles has now caused these blanket inspections to include trains as well as trucks.

The Russians will continue this massive disruption to their logistics for some time, but can be expected to eventually slack off. At that point, it will be safe enough for Ukraine to do the same tricks again, setting off a fresh wave of paranoia and logistical dysfunction. All of this, one can be sure, was entirely intended by Ukraine.

The damage to industrial plants cannot, in fact, be fixed in many cases, or at least not fixed quickly enough to materially help the Russian war effort on any useful timeframe. Recent destruction of Russian semiconductor fabs, for example, cannot be fixed as much of the equipment is of foreign manufacture and sanctions imposed because of the war prevent Russia from acquiring replacements or even repair parts. Nor, as the PRC is also under heavy semiconductor-related sanctions, can Russia’s notional allies in Beijing be of any consequential assistance in this matter.

The Russian semiconductor industry, in any case, was not capable of manufacturing many key components Russia had designed into its military and space systems during happier times and which have also become unavailable due to sanctions. Substitution of home-grown workarounds has seen limited success and, now, with the fabs being targeted and damaged or destroyed, the situation will be far worse.

Just as a general thing, the repair – “fixing” – of damaged heavy and medium industrial facilities requires a lot of young, or at least young-ish, skilled blue collar labor. Heck, so does climbing around on all those trucks and train cars now requiring inspection.

The war, though, has chased at least a million and a half such men out of the country forever – perhaps even 2 million. The war itself has burned up an additional million or more.

And there were not that many to start with. Abysmal, and still-declining, Russian birthrates that have now been going on since even before the Soviet Union fell have rendered Russia a nation that increasingly resembles an old folks home and, in a few more years, a hospice.

Russia must still defend its enormous national perimeter and maintain at least some level of internal security apparat while also continuing to shovel men, wholesale, into the Ukrainian meatgrinder. It must also find enough additional sufficiently youthful bodies to do all of the factory work, factory repair and – now – transport inspections occasioned by the war.

Adding to Russia’s gloomy demographic prospects is the fact that at least as many young women as young men have fled the country in recent years. Those remaining have the world’s highest rate of elective abortions. With so many Russian men now away fighting, dead or crippled by the war, the remaining Russian female cohort of childbearing age has ever-fewer opportunities to find mates with which to produce either offspring or, more likely it would seem, additional abortions.

From both a materiel and manpower standpoint it is hard to see how Russia can continue to prosecute its war with Ukraine for more than perhaps two additional years. Ukraine will be far from being in radiant good health itself if things do continue, pretty much as at present, for that much longer, but Russia will be entirely tapped out.

Oh, a final note – there is no ‘t’ in my last name.

Ukrainian attacks are actually more limited they seem, in view of Russia’s size. They are a major hinderance to Russian war effort in the short to medium term, but are not really doing much long term damage to Russian industry. They target things like production bottlenecks and oil production, as well as military targets. This can be repaired. The problem for the Russian launch industry stem more from a lack of a commercial market. Also, the war effort diverts needed resources.

The Energiya/N-1 pad for Starship perhaps