The news reports on the successful launch of a human spacecraft, and the whole of humanity *** enjoys the joy.
Where do these boosters land when they burn out?
Countless of the world's most advanced rockets have crashed in one of the poorest places in the world.
The Altai Mountains became a spacecraft graveyard, and the graveyard behind the human dream of space.
The Soviet Union has never been at the forefront of international space technology.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome, one of the first to be built, is full of great achievements.
This was the world's first and largest space launch center.
It launched the world's first artificial satellite into space;
it sent Gagarin into space, becoming the first human cosmonaut to go into space ......
Virtually all of Russia's manned spacecraft from the Soviet era have been launched here.
The advanced equipment and proud feats of the spacecraft overshadowed it with endless glory.
But not every operation was always a success.
A world-renowned success is not without countless test flight failures that are hidden from view.
And 1,000 kilometers away from the launch site lies the otherwise quiet Altai Mountains.
It's a natural ecological grassland with a granite landscape.
Due to the remoteness of the place, the lifestyle of the residents here is mostly primitive and rustic.
The grassland is vast, but the houses and people living there are very sparse.
From time to time, a few Siberian wild goats and musk deer can be seen leaping out.
One of the world's most technologically advanced aviation bases, and one of the world's most remote and impoverished regions.
The two extremes, 1,000 kilometers apart, seem to have erected a dimensional wall between them.
But from the 1950s onwards, this sub-dimensional wall was broken down.
The twist that connected the two was a busy rocket launching operation.
Rocket launches were boisterous and intense, with layers of acceleration helping to push the launchers off the Earth and into space.
Watching this scene on a TV screen is a thrilling experience.
If you're observant, you'll notice that with each acceleration, the rocket strips off a portion of its booster.
When the structural "dismemberment" of the rocket ends, most of the boosters consume their fuel and return to the ground as debris under the Earth's gravity.
The launch vehicle also successfully sent the carrier into space, completing the mission.
Stage-by-stage acceleration is also stage-by-stage stripping.
But people tend to notice only the speed that goes straight up into the sky, but rarely pay attention to where the stripped boosters go.
And a successful launch in front of the screen can be the result of countless failed test flights.
Most of the rocket debris and stripped boosters that fail at this launch site end up in the Altai Mountains.
Take the Proton launch vehicle, developed by the Soviet Union and the most powerful in terms of delivery capacity.
It is divided into three stages of acceleration and stripping.
The first stage is the first stage separation of the rocket, where the fallout usually lands within 90 kilometers of the launch pad.
The second stage has a flight time of roughly 14 minutes, and the height and breadth of the fallout increases.
This part also falls heavily in the Altai Mountains, 1,000 kilometers away.
Since its development, Proton's performance level has been continuously enhanced through continuous improvements and upgrades.
To put a 6.3-ton satellite into geostationary orbit requires a 700-ton, 4-stage Proton rocket.
And all models of Proton rockets are launched only at the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
And so the amount of debris that crashed into Altai increased with the growth of Soviet spaceflight.
According to statistics, more than 2,500 tons of spacecraft debris have fallen here since the launch site was opened.
The more than 1,500 residents of the Altai Mountains have long been accustomed to these skyrockets.
For them, these new and heavy contraptions were an eye-opener.
You know how many heavy machinery enthusiasts dream of touching an expensive rocket shell.
What was out of reach for many people landed on their doorstep.
But it didn't take long for residents to realize this wasn't a good thing.
The point at which the heavy debris that fell from the sky landed was uncertain, and danger could strike at any time.
At one point, a 4.5-meter-long fragment of a rocket crashed into the village, nearly destroying a house.
And the people in the house were so frightened that they nearly died.
The phrase "when you're at home, trouble comes from the sky" came true.
Of course, the launch site staff knew that their rocket debris had fallen in the Altai Mountains.
After coordinating and communicating, they notify local residents 24 hours before each launch.
This also gives the residents plenty of time to complete their evacuation and protection.
So far there have been no injuries or fatalities.
Such frequent rocket debris wasn't just randomly left lying around at first.
During the Soviet era, the government was wary of debris being stolen by a rival country, the United States, which would reveal development secrets.
So usually after a rocket launch, the Soviets would make every effort to retrieve it from the Altai Mountains.
But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the turmoil affected the development of Russia's space capabilities.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome is located in the country of Kazakhstan.
Russia can only maintain spacecraft testing and missile launches by continuing to lease the launch site for $110 million per year.
And there would be no time to clean up the debris that crashed in the Altai Mountains.
At this point, the Altai Mountains became a landfill for Russian spacecraft.
Due to this peculiarity, a profession of a rocket scrap dealer appeared here.
They would look into the sky with binoculars to see if any dislodged rocket debris had landed.
Once there was, they tracked the debris to its landing spot in their jeeps.
A bit of searching and loading opens up immediately, with transportation back to base for modification.
The materials used to build the rockets had to be of the highest quality, which was a great bargain for the people of the mountains.
Titanium-aluminum alloys, copper wires, and other components are all "heavenly" metals.
So they rewelded them and made them into tools to use in their lives.
So in the poor Altai Mountains, you might see chicken coops, farm tools, and so on, made from rocket casings.
Maybe even see an Aeroflot logo on a child's sled, which is not a copycat.
Ironically, these same resources that bring extra income to local residents are also brewing deadly disasters.
It didn't take long for people in the Altai Mountains to develop perverse diseases.
A number of endocrine and blood diseases began to occur frequently among the inhabitants.
Although these diseases were fairly routine, the incidence in the Altai region was more than twice as high as the average in other regions.
Not only that, but the health of children has also seriously declined.
In just three years, the proportion of children hospitalized has doubled.
It turns out that the rocket debris that fell from the sky brought a hidden flying disaster to the Altai Mountains.
The Proton rocket boosters are powerful, but they have a hidden downside.
The rocket fuel was a liquid propellant with highly toxic components like metamethylhydrazine, nitrogen tetroxide, and heptyl compounds.
When booster debris falls on grasslands, there is often as much as 10 percent of the fuel remaining.
Sometimes, the remaining fuel allows rocket parts to burn up on the dry prairie.
Not only does this pose a risk to recovery efforts, but highly toxic fluids can leak into the soil.
In this way, the food that local people grow and the water they pump are contaminated.
The sad truth is that while they are grateful for the wealth of resources that have come down from the heavens, they are being persecuted and don't even realize it.
Dozens of liters of fuel are sprayed over square kilometers of land or in rivers.
If an animal passes by and accidentally licks more than one mouthful, it is poisoned.
In 2008, one resident complained to Roscosmos about this.
He claimed that four of his family's horses had died from highly toxic contamination from rocket debris.
Highly toxic substances in rocket fuel enter the human body and not only induce disease, but can also cause cancer.
In 2007 alone, there were 27 cases of pollution-related cancer in the Altai Mountains.
The percentage of deformities in newborns in the region has also risen.
In some heavily polluted villages, almost every newborn suffers from jaundice.
And Russia paid $2 million in compensation for this, having previously admitted that the rocket was loaded with more than the permitted amount of toxic heptyl fuel.
In fact, space graveyards like those in the Altai Mountains are not unique.
NASA's Kennedy Space Agency is located in Florida, and much of the debris from the resulting launches crashed directly into the Atlantic Ocean.
A large, deep-sea no-man's land in the South Pacific is also a space graveyard.
Failed satellites orbiting in near-Earth orbit are often safely relocated and landed here.
The Altai Mountains are one of the few places that actually land on land.
Along with development, the pollution caused by this has become a key consideration.
Russia has been working on a new launch site, the Eastern Cosmodrome, for some time now.
The aim is to reduce pollution in the Altai region, and also to share space missions to the territory of the country.
At the same time, they developed a new type of launch vehicle using liquid oxygen and kerosene as propellants, replacing the Proton rocket.
Behind the joy of successful launches, it is time to see the stricken area that was left behind.
The exciting technology also hides a darker, more backward part of the world that we don't know much about.
The cyberpunk world of sci-fi, projected into reality, can imply the heartbreak of human poverty, disease, and death.
*References
Paul Cooper. In Russia's Space Graveyard, Locals Scavenge Fallen Spacecraft for Profit[J]. The Crux, 2018.06.07.
Maria Vassilieva. Russians say space rocketdebris is health hazard[J]. BBCRussian.com, Altai, Russia, 2012.08.07.
Proton Launch Vehicle. Wikipedia,2018.06.26.
Rocket debris: taking the load off rockets into orbit[J]. Science China, 2017.09.16.