Cosmos as a vague memory
It hurts me The famous Soviet cosmonaut said that space is a fact of the distant past. The era of romance has passed, the era of maturity has not come. We fly to the orbit at an altitude of 180 km and for many, many years we have been talking about returning to the moon and landing on Mars. Space programs of the past end and collapse. The complexes serve their life and are written off for scrap. The ISS alone is circling and circling above the Earth, as if denoting our presence there, as a customs post at a distant, deserted border, to which few people have a deal.
I was lucky. In the fall of 1985, I served six months in the Myshansk training division of the Strategic Missile Forces in Belarus and was preparing to be sent to the combat unit. From our huge call in 3,000 people, only 27 remained in the training room. We tried on the sergeant's shoulder straps and wandered around the training complex in anticipation of “buyers” - officers who would take us to the place of further service. They were jealous of those who remained in the school at commander positions: their future was determined, ours was very vague. After 5 months, the Chernobyl cloud will cover the training, and our colleagues who remain there will be engaged not so much in training the next shift of soldiers as decontamination of the terrain.
The officer who selected the 4th of the remaining 27th. The long road with a transfer in Moscow is literally a few hours, 3 stations around the ring from Belorusskaya to Komsomolskaya, from the memories - only the ticket hall of the Kazan station with a bunch of people in queues. The train is Moscow-Tashkent, where all the passengers are packed to the end of the second-class car, except for us - demob-stroybatovtsy traveling home to the south. And the captain accompanying us, to all the questions about where we are going, the one who answers is there to see. Nothing - a pretty demob-Uzbek smiled at us across the table - everything served and you serve. And only in the vestibule of the car two days later, late in the evening before disembarking at Tyura-Tam station, the captain said: “You arrived at Baikonur, you will take part in the preparations for the launch of our Soviet Shuttle”. Soviet "Shuttle" ???
Baikonur is not the first Soviet missile range. Earlier, Kapustin Yar was built in the valley of the Volga. But, having started construction in the Kazakh semi-desert Kyzyl-Kum in 1955, we already launched the first satellite in 1957, in 1959 we sent the station to the moon, and in 1961 the first cosmonaut of the planet, Yuri Gagarin, was in space.
')
On all maps of the USSR, Baikonur was shown 200 kilometers to the north of its present position. Damn secrecy! - it is immediately clear that no one would put the city in the desert on the river (Ilf and Petrov laughed at her back in the 30s: We sat in a cafe in Yalta on the banks of the N-sea). Then, Baikonur, nevertheless, is the name of the cosmodrome. The station on the Moscow-Tashkent branch is called TyuraTam, and the city itself is Leninsk, or site 10. Over the vast territory of the cosmodrome, there are at least fifty sites scattered, but the maximum number is 254th, the landing strip of heavy aircraft and, in fact, Burana. Leninsk himself at that time was a huge city with a hundred-thousand population, beaches along the Syr Darya River, shops, clubs, a branch of the Moscow Aviation Institute and an obligatory VOSTOK rocket on a pedestal, set up not on VDNKh, but on an inclination.
Every morning the officers' people move forward to the truck - so-called small echelons of 3-5-7 cars that carry them around the sites. Guides in the cars - also conscripts soldiers, railway troops. But this is a small part of the Baikonur army, the basis is, of course, the construction battalion, the space troops and the commandant's office. Officially, space troops, as such, in the USSR was not. According to the buttonholes, the personnel were rocket engineers, then, since 1987, pilots, and the name was then GUKOS (General Directorate of Space Facilities of the Ministry of Defense), then UNKS (Directorate of the Chief of Space Facilities). When the Space Forces as part of the Strategic Missile Forces, even the names of their chiefs were the same - Maksimov, only the commander-in-chief of the rocket forces was a general of the army, and the space forces - a colonel-general (was it the same secrecy? Or was it a coincidence). In fact, graduates of very many military schools were sent to Baikonur, even submarine officers (apparently, there were similar systems on submarines), and for some time they walked around Baikonur in sea uniform and flared with sand. A sort of desert ships.
Baikonur was not only a space range. There were a lot of mines with strategic missiles on it - many of them were blown up in the 70s, after the signing of the Soviet-American treaty SALT-1, and it was blown up - so that it could be seen from the satellites. But the main thing, of course, is space. Sites, playgrounds, playgrounds. Launch complexes, assembling complexes, assembling and testing complexes (MIKi), huge facilities for refueling, vibrating tables ... Airfields and railway tracks for bringing a huge amount of equipment (the Energia-Buran launch complex alone - 5 floors of underground structures down to the base of the starting table).
Each site is a piece of life torn from the desert. Equal high-rise buildings - hotels for travelers and barracks typical for the whole of the USSR and other facilities of military units - headquarters, club, canteen. A bit of greenery on black soil poured over the sand and clay, like everything here - imported. On the soils of the Kyzyl Kum only camel thorns and famous Baikonur tulips, with fleshy leaves similar to a cactus without needles, grew - but their age was very short, not more than 2 weeks. Sharply continental climate - the transition from winter to summer and back took about ten days from strength, and a maximum of two rains fell throughout the summer.
Like much in the USSR, information about the space program was closed and classified. The TV report shown at the next space launch is always the same. The service farms are moving away, after a few seconds the fuel-drain mast is shot off, the spacecraft rises slightly above the launching table, so that, turning on axes, supports with counterweights go away from it, and then a jerk into space. Observing this picture almost every 2 weeks from the roof of the barracks, we already knew that everything was a bit wrong. Service farms take half an hour and lie almost horizontally. The top of the rocket, depending on whether the crew flies with people or an ordinary satellite, has a different color. On the ship with the astronauts to the spire crowning the rocket, a rim of gunpowder stitches is attached, or CAC - an emergency rescue system, analogous to an aircraft catapult. It was she who saved the crew of UNION T-10 with Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov on board in 1983, lifting the capsule with the astronauts to a height of 1 kilometer away from the rocket that exploded at the start.
The space program works like a clock. On the next launch of the newspaper reported on the last page in a note the size of a matchbox. Virtually not a single accident in many years - all the stories about this are only in the memoirs of the officers during the patrols in Leninsk. About an explosion at the start in 1960, killing 70 people, including the first commander of the Strategic Missile Forces, Mitrofan Nedelin. About the exploded immediately after the start of the predecessor "Lunokhod-2", the wreckage of which fell asleep looking at the start of rotozeev - after many successful starts, people completely lost caution and watched everything in close proximity. On a separate corner of the cemetery, where all those killed at the start of the lunar rocket H1 are buried. But the stories, of course, not only about this. On the launch of four research stations on Mars in succession - 90 days of continuous work on site 95; there is even a postage stamp depicting the red planet and the Mars-4 stations ... Mars-7 against its background. About the future of the space program, when it takes just 90 minutes from the moment a decision is made to launch a rocket into space (for other rockets at that time, pre-launch preparation is measured in days - from 2 for Soyuz to 28 for Energia). About future space stations - just at that time the program of the Salyut stations was over and a new-generation station, Mir, was launched.
There are many launch sites. The one next to us is the famous deuce, the Gagarinsky start. But there are 32 more, from where the same Soyuz missiles are leaving for space. There is a heavy carrier rocket “Proton”, for which two launch complexes were built at sites 95 and 200 - dual and quad. There are mines, from which non-heavy satellites can be launched into space rockets. And there are a large number of structures under our future "Shuttle" - "Buran". A huge start-up, 250y, and a dual launch complex that is under construction, an object 858/110, which we will serve all one and a half years of service, a MIC with a gate 20 floors high and a huge cyclopean installer to deliver the ship to the launch complex, driven by two paired diesel locomotives along two parallel paths at a distance of 15 meters from each other.
The launch complex for Energy-Buran is not new. 20 years ago it was created for the huge (about 100 meters high!) H1 rocket, our failed program of landing a man on the moon. The H1 rocket was built according to the royal principle - a bunch of 30 medium power engines for a set of the necessary thrust. The rocket was unsuccessful, and maybe, as the KB officials say, it simply was not allowed to be brought. Anyway, 4 explosions during the test immediately after the start were a sentence. The project was abandoned, and we didn’t have time for the Moon before the Americans - it was already 1974. The States rehabilitated for the lag in space exploration, but we, almost simultaneously with the United States, began developing the next-generation, reusable spacecraft.
Officers of military schools graduated every year arrived at Baikonur just in batches. In the staffing of the space forces officers were more than soldiers. Eight engineers of the department (with six soldiers) claimed the same position as the head of the department, the captain's post. I have rarely met such enthusiastic and devoted people in my life. The newly arrived lieutenants gazed with delight at the lightning arrays' mustaches sticking out from behind the horizon and asked - is it there, is there a launch facility? Many were practicing at the cosmodrome, but most often it was a small northern test site in Plesetsk (the main supplier of officers for the space forces was the Leningrad VIKI named after Mozhaisky, but also "allied workers" from the schools of rocket forces in Kharkov and Serpukhov, and sometimes officers -podvodniki).
A full-fledged launch-stand, platform 250, was created for running-in of a new hydrogen engine of the heavyweight booster rocket “Energy”. To bring a large mass into orbit on a traditional chemical fuel (oxygen + kerosene), as shown by the experience of the same H1 - a dead-end path, it was necessary to make a modern hydrogen engine. The fact that the father of the German "FAU-2" Werner von Braun did for the American lunar "Saturn-5", 2 of 3 stages of which worked on hydrogen fuel. The task is more than nontrivial. Liquid hydrogen is difficult to store (a cryogenic center is needed) and it is even harder to transport - mixed with oxygen, it gives an explosive mixture, exploding from the slightest spark. One hundred tons of liquid hydrogen and more than eight hundred tons of oxygen are the starting refueling of Energia. The gases in the liquid state wash the ship’s skeleton, improving its strength properties. To fill the hydrogen from the tank, the air is first forced out with inert gases — nitrogen and helium. The explosion of such a quantity of fuel is in Hiroshima’s power, perhaps without environmental pollution; hydrogen is a highly environmentally friendly fuel.
The speed of construction was amazing. Thousands of civilian specialists from head enterprises in Kazan, Leningrad, Kuibyshev, Moscow went around the cosmodrome, who methodically handed over all launch systems to the military, transferred endless volumes with documentation, filled with huge drawings, wiring diagrams, control panels. Sometimes I came across for example the drawings of other launch complexes, which I considered as maps of unknown islands from adventure novels. In the steppe, there was a huge amount of all parts and mechanisms from the past of the lunar start — old instruments, protected by lighting lamps. The protection dome against the lunar H1 stood in the neighboring construction battalion as a popshell. The names of the instrument series that came across some of the wreckage were fun - it turns out that all the equipment on the old lunar and new Buranovsky start had a through numbering (the development was separated for more than 10 years)! Planned economy and the same academic institutions working on the space program.
1986 - the year of full autonomous tests of the future system. At the start, they put an exact mock-up of a ship with real engines, but with a non-space skin. Passed a full cycle - fuel injection, engine purging, discharge. In memory so far - a burning tongue of flame from a broken pipe refueling on the screen of a technological television system; automation quickly cut off the problem area. On the night of the engine purge, the entire training ground was without light, everything took over the start. The barracks were lit with a kerosene lamp, but in the steppe there was a giant sheaf of light: the launch complex with a ship on it was lit by all six towers with 140 five-kilowatt lamps on each.
Over time, the abundance of high-ranking officials has ceased to be something out of the ordinary. In one of the 6 halls of the underground structure that we served, he ran into Colonel General German Titov, the number 2 astronaut and Gagarin's backup in his first space flight. There was not enough audacity to ask for an autograph - usually astronauts signed the military card directly. The inspectors came from Moscow, and at the words “We are the people of Barmin himself!” The generals — Barmin, the chief designer of the launch complexes — were one of the “Council of Chief Designers” Korolev, quietly standing at attention. In the end, Gorbachev himself arrived, and for him, a rocket was put on the Gagarinsky launch, after it was removed. It was in May, before the very first start of "Energy". Knowing the evil zeal of his subordinates, Mikhal Sergeevich ordered not to let the rocket to the next anniversary, and once again to check everything thoroughly after his departure. As a result, everything went without a hitch.
The space bird - “Buran” - apparently, was not ready at the same time as “Energy”, and they decided to carry out the first launch of the new carrier without a ship. This, by the way, was a very important fundamental difference between the Soviet reusable program and the American one. When the Shuttle starts, the spacecraft engine works by helping the main tank and two side accelerators to gain the first space velocity. "Energy" does not need a Buran engine at all - the main tank thrust and 4 side accelerators are enough. As a result, the payload is greater by several times - from 30 tons to a little with the Shuttle to 108 in the limit of Energia. The cause of the explosion of the Shuttle was a side solid fuel accelerator. The “side” of Energia proved to be an extremely successful traditional liquid-fuel rocket, and to this day, under the name Zenit, flies to this day as the carrier of the middle class.
The first launch was scheduled with the Polyus-K space unit as a load. For the start, it was decided to use the bench complex - platform 250, as more ready (on the 110th the installation of the right start was completed, and the farms and systems intended for landing the crew and missing on the 250th were not needed this time). The export of “Energy” with the “Pole” to the start took place on the night from winter to spring - February 28, 1987, and was accompanied by a completely wild snowfall. However, what is bad weather next to the ship with a starting mass of 2000 tons. With a fully normal behavior of all systems, the ship had to go into space after 28 days. However, tests, delays, brought the start time to May. Even greater delays would require to remove the ship again in the MIC and deal with the problems already there. As a result, the start was scheduled for May 15th.
On this day everyone was evacuated. All structures in the radius of destruction were closed to the castle - all personnel moved forward to a remote site, away for a 10-kilometer zone around the start, the experience of testing H1 was taken into account. Between the site where we spent in idleness all on May 15, and the launch complex, apparently, there was some kind of lowland, and the launch complex with the ship on it was visible, in full view. Nothing happened the whole day.
At six in the evening under the bulk of the ship there was a flash of fire. The “energy” began to rise smoothly, accompanied by the unreal beauty of a flaming hydrogen flame of absolutely white color. The handsome ship went into the sky almost silently, leaving a small plume of mist.
The next day, the entire summer norm of rain was spilled on Baikonur.
On one of these days, the USSR TST showed the launch of the ship for the first time and opened the fact that we still have launch pads, in addition to Gagarin. The camera was positioned so that in the focus of the famous “two” on the horizon could be seen the huge buildings of the Energy-Buran launches.
A week later, I was demobilized. Colleagues brought home souvenirs - crumpled pieces of metal structures of the launch complex, scorched by the flown away rocket.
After another year and a half - the day after the first launch - “Energy” with “Buran” was launched in unmanned mode. The ship circled the Earth twice and boarded the Yubileyny airfield just 5 kilometers from the start. Spare landing strips in Kamchatka and in the Crimea under Simferopol could also receive a space shuttle. But there were no more flights.
In May 2002, the roof of an abandoned assembly complex at site 112 collapsed at Baikonur, burying the last operating model of the Buran, the pride and the top of the Soviet space program.
It hurts me
I was lucky. In the fall of 1985, I served six months in the Myshansk training division of the Strategic Missile Forces in Belarus and was preparing to be sent to the combat unit. From our huge call in 3,000 people, only 27 remained in the training room. We tried on the sergeant's shoulder straps and wandered around the training complex in anticipation of “buyers” - officers who would take us to the place of further service. They were jealous of those who remained in the school at commander positions: their future was determined, ours was very vague. After 5 months, the Chernobyl cloud will cover the training, and our colleagues who remain there will be engaged not so much in training the next shift of soldiers as decontamination of the terrain.
The officer who selected the 4th of the remaining 27th. The long road with a transfer in Moscow is literally a few hours, 3 stations around the ring from Belorusskaya to Komsomolskaya, from the memories - only the ticket hall of the Kazan station with a bunch of people in queues. The train is Moscow-Tashkent, where all the passengers are packed to the end of the second-class car, except for us - demob-stroybatovtsy traveling home to the south. And the captain accompanying us, to all the questions about where we are going, the one who answers is there to see. Nothing - a pretty demob-Uzbek smiled at us across the table - everything served and you serve. And only in the vestibule of the car two days later, late in the evening before disembarking at Tyura-Tam station, the captain said: “You arrived at Baikonur, you will take part in the preparations for the launch of our Soviet Shuttle”. Soviet "Shuttle" ???
Baikonur is not the first Soviet missile range. Earlier, Kapustin Yar was built in the valley of the Volga. But, having started construction in the Kazakh semi-desert Kyzyl-Kum in 1955, we already launched the first satellite in 1957, in 1959 we sent the station to the moon, and in 1961 the first cosmonaut of the planet, Yuri Gagarin, was in space.
')
On all maps of the USSR, Baikonur was shown 200 kilometers to the north of its present position. Damn secrecy! - it is immediately clear that no one would put the city in the desert on the river (Ilf and Petrov laughed at her back in the 30s: We sat in a cafe in Yalta on the banks of the N-sea). Then, Baikonur, nevertheless, is the name of the cosmodrome. The station on the Moscow-Tashkent branch is called TyuraTam, and the city itself is Leninsk, or site 10. Over the vast territory of the cosmodrome, there are at least fifty sites scattered, but the maximum number is 254th, the landing strip of heavy aircraft and, in fact, Burana. Leninsk himself at that time was a huge city with a hundred-thousand population, beaches along the Syr Darya River, shops, clubs, a branch of the Moscow Aviation Institute and an obligatory VOSTOK rocket on a pedestal, set up not on VDNKh, but on an inclination.
Every morning the officers' people move forward to the truck - so-called small echelons of 3-5-7 cars that carry them around the sites. Guides in the cars - also conscripts soldiers, railway troops. But this is a small part of the Baikonur army, the basis is, of course, the construction battalion, the space troops and the commandant's office. Officially, space troops, as such, in the USSR was not. According to the buttonholes, the personnel were rocket engineers, then, since 1987, pilots, and the name was then GUKOS (General Directorate of Space Facilities of the Ministry of Defense), then UNKS (Directorate of the Chief of Space Facilities). When the Space Forces as part of the Strategic Missile Forces, even the names of their chiefs were the same - Maksimov, only the commander-in-chief of the rocket forces was a general of the army, and the space forces - a colonel-general (was it the same secrecy? Or was it a coincidence). In fact, graduates of very many military schools were sent to Baikonur, even submarine officers (apparently, there were similar systems on submarines), and for some time they walked around Baikonur in sea uniform and flared with sand. A sort of desert ships.
Baikonur was not only a space range. There were a lot of mines with strategic missiles on it - many of them were blown up in the 70s, after the signing of the Soviet-American treaty SALT-1, and it was blown up - so that it could be seen from the satellites. But the main thing, of course, is space. Sites, playgrounds, playgrounds. Launch complexes, assembling complexes, assembling and testing complexes (MIKi), huge facilities for refueling, vibrating tables ... Airfields and railway tracks for bringing a huge amount of equipment (the Energia-Buran launch complex alone - 5 floors of underground structures down to the base of the starting table).
Each site is a piece of life torn from the desert. Equal high-rise buildings - hotels for travelers and barracks typical for the whole of the USSR and other facilities of military units - headquarters, club, canteen. A bit of greenery on black soil poured over the sand and clay, like everything here - imported. On the soils of the Kyzyl Kum only camel thorns and famous Baikonur tulips, with fleshy leaves similar to a cactus without needles, grew - but their age was very short, not more than 2 weeks. Sharply continental climate - the transition from winter to summer and back took about ten days from strength, and a maximum of two rains fell throughout the summer.
Like much in the USSR, information about the space program was closed and classified. The TV report shown at the next space launch is always the same. The service farms are moving away, after a few seconds the fuel-drain mast is shot off, the spacecraft rises slightly above the launching table, so that, turning on axes, supports with counterweights go away from it, and then a jerk into space. Observing this picture almost every 2 weeks from the roof of the barracks, we already knew that everything was a bit wrong. Service farms take half an hour and lie almost horizontally. The top of the rocket, depending on whether the crew flies with people or an ordinary satellite, has a different color. On the ship with the astronauts to the spire crowning the rocket, a rim of gunpowder stitches is attached, or CAC - an emergency rescue system, analogous to an aircraft catapult. It was she who saved the crew of UNION T-10 with Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov on board in 1983, lifting the capsule with the astronauts to a height of 1 kilometer away from the rocket that exploded at the start.
The space program works like a clock. On the next launch of the newspaper reported on the last page in a note the size of a matchbox. Virtually not a single accident in many years - all the stories about this are only in the memoirs of the officers during the patrols in Leninsk. About an explosion at the start in 1960, killing 70 people, including the first commander of the Strategic Missile Forces, Mitrofan Nedelin. About the exploded immediately after the start of the predecessor "Lunokhod-2", the wreckage of which fell asleep looking at the start of rotozeev - after many successful starts, people completely lost caution and watched everything in close proximity. On a separate corner of the cemetery, where all those killed at the start of the lunar rocket H1 are buried. But the stories, of course, not only about this. On the launch of four research stations on Mars in succession - 90 days of continuous work on site 95; there is even a postage stamp depicting the red planet and the Mars-4 stations ... Mars-7 against its background. About the future of the space program, when it takes just 90 minutes from the moment a decision is made to launch a rocket into space (for other rockets at that time, pre-launch preparation is measured in days - from 2 for Soyuz to 28 for Energia). About future space stations - just at that time the program of the Salyut stations was over and a new-generation station, Mir, was launched.
There are many launch sites. The one next to us is the famous deuce, the Gagarinsky start. But there are 32 more, from where the same Soyuz missiles are leaving for space. There is a heavy carrier rocket “Proton”, for which two launch complexes were built at sites 95 and 200 - dual and quad. There are mines, from which non-heavy satellites can be launched into space rockets. And there are a large number of structures under our future "Shuttle" - "Buran". A huge start-up, 250y, and a dual launch complex that is under construction, an object 858/110, which we will serve all one and a half years of service, a MIC with a gate 20 floors high and a huge cyclopean installer to deliver the ship to the launch complex, driven by two paired diesel locomotives along two parallel paths at a distance of 15 meters from each other.
The launch complex for Energy-Buran is not new. 20 years ago it was created for the huge (about 100 meters high!) H1 rocket, our failed program of landing a man on the moon. The H1 rocket was built according to the royal principle - a bunch of 30 medium power engines for a set of the necessary thrust. The rocket was unsuccessful, and maybe, as the KB officials say, it simply was not allowed to be brought. Anyway, 4 explosions during the test immediately after the start were a sentence. The project was abandoned, and we didn’t have time for the Moon before the Americans - it was already 1974. The States rehabilitated for the lag in space exploration, but we, almost simultaneously with the United States, began developing the next-generation, reusable spacecraft.
Officers of military schools graduated every year arrived at Baikonur just in batches. In the staffing of the space forces officers were more than soldiers. Eight engineers of the department (with six soldiers) claimed the same position as the head of the department, the captain's post. I have rarely met such enthusiastic and devoted people in my life. The newly arrived lieutenants gazed with delight at the lightning arrays' mustaches sticking out from behind the horizon and asked - is it there, is there a launch facility? Many were practicing at the cosmodrome, but most often it was a small northern test site in Plesetsk (the main supplier of officers for the space forces was the Leningrad VIKI named after Mozhaisky, but also "allied workers" from the schools of rocket forces in Kharkov and Serpukhov, and sometimes officers -podvodniki).
A full-fledged launch-stand, platform 250, was created for running-in of a new hydrogen engine of the heavyweight booster rocket “Energy”. To bring a large mass into orbit on a traditional chemical fuel (oxygen + kerosene), as shown by the experience of the same H1 - a dead-end path, it was necessary to make a modern hydrogen engine. The fact that the father of the German "FAU-2" Werner von Braun did for the American lunar "Saturn-5", 2 of 3 stages of which worked on hydrogen fuel. The task is more than nontrivial. Liquid hydrogen is difficult to store (a cryogenic center is needed) and it is even harder to transport - mixed with oxygen, it gives an explosive mixture, exploding from the slightest spark. One hundred tons of liquid hydrogen and more than eight hundred tons of oxygen are the starting refueling of Energia. The gases in the liquid state wash the ship’s skeleton, improving its strength properties. To fill the hydrogen from the tank, the air is first forced out with inert gases — nitrogen and helium. The explosion of such a quantity of fuel is in Hiroshima’s power, perhaps without environmental pollution; hydrogen is a highly environmentally friendly fuel.
The speed of construction was amazing. Thousands of civilian specialists from head enterprises in Kazan, Leningrad, Kuibyshev, Moscow went around the cosmodrome, who methodically handed over all launch systems to the military, transferred endless volumes with documentation, filled with huge drawings, wiring diagrams, control panels. Sometimes I came across for example the drawings of other launch complexes, which I considered as maps of unknown islands from adventure novels. In the steppe, there was a huge amount of all parts and mechanisms from the past of the lunar start — old instruments, protected by lighting lamps. The protection dome against the lunar H1 stood in the neighboring construction battalion as a popshell. The names of the instrument series that came across some of the wreckage were fun - it turns out that all the equipment on the old lunar and new Buranovsky start had a through numbering (the development was separated for more than 10 years)! Planned economy and the same academic institutions working on the space program.
1986 - the year of full autonomous tests of the future system. At the start, they put an exact mock-up of a ship with real engines, but with a non-space skin. Passed a full cycle - fuel injection, engine purging, discharge. In memory so far - a burning tongue of flame from a broken pipe refueling on the screen of a technological television system; automation quickly cut off the problem area. On the night of the engine purge, the entire training ground was without light, everything took over the start. The barracks were lit with a kerosene lamp, but in the steppe there was a giant sheaf of light: the launch complex with a ship on it was lit by all six towers with 140 five-kilowatt lamps on each.
Over time, the abundance of high-ranking officials has ceased to be something out of the ordinary. In one of the 6 halls of the underground structure that we served, he ran into Colonel General German Titov, the number 2 astronaut and Gagarin's backup in his first space flight. There was not enough audacity to ask for an autograph - usually astronauts signed the military card directly. The inspectors came from Moscow, and at the words “We are the people of Barmin himself!” The generals — Barmin, the chief designer of the launch complexes — were one of the “Council of Chief Designers” Korolev, quietly standing at attention. In the end, Gorbachev himself arrived, and for him, a rocket was put on the Gagarinsky launch, after it was removed. It was in May, before the very first start of "Energy". Knowing the evil zeal of his subordinates, Mikhal Sergeevich ordered not to let the rocket to the next anniversary, and once again to check everything thoroughly after his departure. As a result, everything went without a hitch.
The space bird - “Buran” - apparently, was not ready at the same time as “Energy”, and they decided to carry out the first launch of the new carrier without a ship. This, by the way, was a very important fundamental difference between the Soviet reusable program and the American one. When the Shuttle starts, the spacecraft engine works by helping the main tank and two side accelerators to gain the first space velocity. "Energy" does not need a Buran engine at all - the main tank thrust and 4 side accelerators are enough. As a result, the payload is greater by several times - from 30 tons to a little with the Shuttle to 108 in the limit of Energia. The cause of the explosion of the Shuttle was a side solid fuel accelerator. The “side” of Energia proved to be an extremely successful traditional liquid-fuel rocket, and to this day, under the name Zenit, flies to this day as the carrier of the middle class.
The first launch was scheduled with the Polyus-K space unit as a load. For the start, it was decided to use the bench complex - platform 250, as more ready (on the 110th the installation of the right start was completed, and the farms and systems intended for landing the crew and missing on the 250th were not needed this time). The export of “Energy” with the “Pole” to the start took place on the night from winter to spring - February 28, 1987, and was accompanied by a completely wild snowfall. However, what is bad weather next to the ship with a starting mass of 2000 tons. With a fully normal behavior of all systems, the ship had to go into space after 28 days. However, tests, delays, brought the start time to May. Even greater delays would require to remove the ship again in the MIC and deal with the problems already there. As a result, the start was scheduled for May 15th.
On this day everyone was evacuated. All structures in the radius of destruction were closed to the castle - all personnel moved forward to a remote site, away for a 10-kilometer zone around the start, the experience of testing H1 was taken into account. Between the site where we spent in idleness all on May 15, and the launch complex, apparently, there was some kind of lowland, and the launch complex with the ship on it was visible, in full view. Nothing happened the whole day.
At six in the evening under the bulk of the ship there was a flash of fire. The “energy” began to rise smoothly, accompanied by the unreal beauty of a flaming hydrogen flame of absolutely white color. The handsome ship went into the sky almost silently, leaving a small plume of mist.
The next day, the entire summer norm of rain was spilled on Baikonur.
On one of these days, the USSR TST showed the launch of the ship for the first time and opened the fact that we still have launch pads, in addition to Gagarin. The camera was positioned so that in the focus of the famous “two” on the horizon could be seen the huge buildings of the Energy-Buran launches.
A week later, I was demobilized. Colleagues brought home souvenirs - crumpled pieces of metal structures of the launch complex, scorched by the flown away rocket.
After another year and a half - the day after the first launch - “Energy” with “Buran” was launched in unmanned mode. The ship circled the Earth twice and boarded the Yubileyny airfield just 5 kilometers from the start. Spare landing strips in Kamchatka and in the Crimea under Simferopol could also receive a space shuttle. But there were no more flights.
In May 2002, the roof of an abandoned assembly complex at site 112 collapsed at Baikonur, burying the last operating model of the Buran, the pride and the top of the Soviet space program.
It hurts me
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/446994/
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