BAIKONUR JOURNAL
“Russian Space Center in
Kazakhstan Counts Down Its Days of Glory
Published: June 18, 2013
BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan — On a sultry desert evening, as bats
fluttered about this town’s riverfront park, a man emerged from a reedy marsh
carrying a bundle of grass tied with twine.
Setting it down to brush himself off, he
explained that he was keeping a calf in the courtyard of an apartment building
across town, where he had settled in recently after the previous occupants,
engineers with the Russian space program, moved out…”
Cassi
Creek: Despite the billions of dollars
and rubles spent during the Space Race the U.S. space exploration program is
waiting for an administration and a Congress with greater interest in scientific
research than with enriching corporations.
The rocketry that took us to the moon and back is no longer
available. The former “space coast” is
no longer mobbed by people anxious to see shuttle and other launches. The rocket scientists have largely retired
and left the area or migrated to what remains of NASA.
It appears that Baikonur is rapidly
returning to the third world region that it was until the USSR wanted a place
to build and launch rockets secretly.
Now their Germans are long gone and the launch and return technology is
decades out of date with little hope of improving. Only money from NASA and the European space
program keep the launches happening for the Cosmodrome.
The only active program now building
heavy launch vehicles is the DPRC. That,
frankly, scares me. It should scare
everyone. It is not yet time to
privatize space exploration. Nor is it
time for the United States or Russia to allow China to gain ascendency in space
exploration at any range.
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