Check Out The Piece Of History This Urban Explorer Discovered In Kazakhstan
by N/A, 10 years ago |
3 min read
Urban explorer and photographer, Ralph Mirebs, is always in search of things that fascinate, and when he finds them, he immediately shares them with the public for others to enjoy. Well, recently, he discovered something that he felt especially compelled to share.
On a recent trek in Kazakhstan, he came across a remarkable spectacle - a massive, abandoned Soviet Space Shuttle Program hangar. Here are the extraordinary images he captured.
The abandoned hangar is located at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, much of which is still in operation. This hangar however, as you can see, is not.
With the discontinuation of NASA’s shuttle program, Russian Soyuz shuttles are the only means left that astronauts can use reach the International Space Station.
What Mireb found inside was truly remarkable...
"Buran Shuttles," the last remaining prototypes of the monumental Russian Buran Space Program that lasted from 1974...
The rear shuttle served as an operational prototype while the front shuttle operated as a test mock-up for mating and load tests.
To 1993, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and the program stopped receiving governmental funding.
Despite the program only completing one automated orbital flight before being shut down, its initiatives led to a bounty of space exploration intel and advancement, along with pushing America to further its own.
The hangar, once maintained an artificially high atmospheric pressure to prevent dust accumulation, but as is plain to see, those systems have long since failed.
The shuttles are even still surrounded by the 'pneumatic platforms' that allowed engineers to work on them without damaging their ceramic tiles.
As remarkable and awe-inspiring as the hangar's stature and contents are though, it's easy fairly easy to understand why it could no longer be maintained.
“The romance of space exploration is gone, leaving only dry figures and financial statistics. Why spend billions on space if it does not bring profit in the foreseeable future?†Mirebs asks on his blog.
“You can regret the lost time and mourn the greatness of the past, but the facts remain – Russia is rapidly losing its status as a leading space power."
And while it'd be easy to lament the ending of an era, it's far more important that we keep the memory of these historical treasures alive, appreciating all the incredible things they accomplished while they were in use.
