3, 2, 1… liftoff!

At last! Another dream of mine has come true – to see a spaceship take off! Hurray!

Last week it left Baikonur in Kazakhstan, and by the weekend it had already reached the International Space Station and docked. The crew’s made up of two Russians and one American – which perhaps explains why around town and in our hotel much American-accented English was to be heard.

We watched the liftoff from about two kilometers away, which might seem a long way off. But it isn’t. This isn’t U2 playing a stadium where being at the back is almost a waste of time and money… This is the Baikonur experience. The power generated by the massive rocket engines shook everything around so much it felt like an earthquake was occurring at the same time as the liftoff. Rather unnerving.

The spike on the top means the ship’s manned; if it was without one, it would mean no crew – an unmanned remote-controlled cargo mission

The steppe all around was lit up bright orange too for several seconds. Amazing! Intense! But sadly so short-lived. Just minutes later the Soyuz (which incidentally means ‘Union’, no doubt of the Soviet kind :) was already out of sight. Nevertheless, I heartily recommend everyone to experience a spaceship launch. Next time I want to see a Proton take off. That rocket is more powerful and they say it needs to be witnessed by day (and I’m guessing a bit further away).

When rockets aren’t taking off from the cosmodrome, your attention naturally falls on the Kazakh surroundings around Baikonur – and they’re pretty bleak. Barren yellow steppe desert, no green vegetation whatsoever… thoroughly lifeless flatness. At least now. In a few weeks everything will blossom and be fragrant, but now it’s pure dismalness and sterile melancholy. What makes it worse are the abandoned bits of old equipment and scraps of iron strewn all over the place, plus seemingly disused and thoroughly unsightly old hangars.

But enough of the negative. Now for some positive…

There are two very interesting cosmonaut museums (one in town, one at the cosmodrome); there’s Gagarin’s house at the cosmodrome, where he stayed before and after his historic mission; there’s the space college… and all sorts of other fascinating stuff – all of it, naturally, simply cosmic!

What a female crew of a descending Proton module would look like. Not. It turned out (in tests) that at liftoff the rocket gives a G-force that’s just too much for humans to take. Piloted launches of a Proton have thus never taken place.

Buran from the outside…

…and from inside

Seen Gravity yet?

And the view from underneath the Buran

Gagarin’s house

…And inside Yuri Alexeyevich’s house. The red inscription reads ‘let’s go!’ Humble words famously uttered before his un-humble historic lift-off in 1961

The inevitable patterned rug…

…The inevitable portrait

Epochal cosmodrome journal diary entry: ‘Man in space!!! Hurray!!!’

You might not believe me, but this is a computer. Without it there’d have been no Gagarin in space

Launch controls

Baikonur layout model

Assembly hangar

The Energia-Buran platform. We saw the Soyuz launch from near it

Some pics from the town:

Guess who?

Junk in the trunk

A close-up of the crew-carrying pod at the tip

No comment!

The space school

Almost all the mock-ups here actually fly, including the pencils, carrots…

…and acorns!

Real-world C3PO and R2D2

Told you they flew!

Buran pilot’s chair

And more kit, all genuine, some of it having been in space:

When you see it… :)

A paper plane ticket! Haven’t felt one of these in my hands for a while. I particularly liked who’s given as the carrier: ‘YOU’!!

The rest of the photos are here.

A great, memorable trip. Highly recommended!