Kazakhstan's Spaceship Junkyard

Richard W.M. Jones writes "What happens to the booster stages of rockets? They fall back to earth, and in most cases into the oceans. But not in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, where the first stages fall over populated farmland. The locals have become rich dealing in the titanium-rich scrap metal as this article and this remarkable photo essay show. So far the only casualties seem to have been a few dead cows."

Article Text

[joey.dale]

On April 16, Russia announced that it would henceforth launch military satellites at the Pletsnesk cosmodrome in northern Russia, ending the practice of launching satellites from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This shift will deprive Kazakh children of the chance to watch some satellites take off, though Baikonur will remain the launchpad for commercial "birds" and manned missions. As these photos show, it will also spare Kazakhs the fallout, literal and otherwise, that occurs in a launch's wake.

All space-bound rockets consist largely of fuel tanks and booster stages that fall back to earth when spent, never reaching orbit. In landlocked Baikonur, Russia's primary launching complex in Kazakhstan, these spaceships crash to earth. This photo essay visits the areas where the supporting rockets land, and shows the people living under the flight paths who contend with flaming spaceship wrecks several times each month.

Apart from the fear of having a spaceship crash through their roofs, residents in the area complain of the ill effects of leftover toxic rocket fuel. With the relocation of Russian military launches, more than half of which currently take off from Baikonur, these people may get some relief. However, one group of people is probably sorry to see Baikonur lose business; the region's scrap metal dealers are getting rich trading metal from the rockets' titanium alloy hulls.

Titanium is a pain to weld or melt in the house.

[NRAdude]

Needs about 1,668 degrees Celsius to melt. That's all they can do with it...sell it. I can vouch for one thing, more jewelry is being made of titanium. Strange choice, but consider that 1,000 years ago aluminum was a hundred times more valuable than gold. I melt aluminum into ingots to save when I complete a mold for a tool I need to build. That's the only way to be certain somthing is made in America today, it seems. More power to Our Kazakhstan neighbors.

Cache

[Anonymous Coward]

Coral cache due to /.ing:
http://www.eurasianet.org.nyud.net:8090/department s/culture/articles/photo_pages/essay_proj2.cfm?ser ies=sj&ID=1&max=12&ss=off [nyud.net]

Re:Gimme Back My Bullets

[FusionDragon2099]

That was in Bowling for Columbine, and it was bullets from K-Mart. Wrong on 2 counts, bucko.

Re:Server going down?

[eobanb]

here, have a nice big helping of article text.

KAZAKHSTAN'S SPACESHIP JUNKYARD
A EurasiaNet Photo Essay by Jonas Bendiksen
Text by Laara Matsen

On April 16, Russia announced that it would henceforth launch military satellites at the Pletsnesk cosmodrome in northern Russia, ending the practice of launching satellites from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. This shift will deprive Kazakh children of the chance to watch some satellites take off, though Baikonur will remain the launchpad for commercial "birds" and manned missions. As these photos show, it will also spare Kazakhs the fallout, literal and otherwise, that occurs in a launch's wake.

All space-bound rockets consist largely of fuel tanks and booster stages that fall back to earth when spent, never reaching orbit. In landlocked Baikonur, Russia's primary launching complex in Kazakhstan, these spaceships crash to earth. This photo essay visits the areas where the supporting rockets land, and shows the people living under the flight paths who contend with flaming spaceship wrecks several times each month.

Apart from the fear of having a spaceship crash through their roofs, residents in the area complain of the ill effects of leftover toxic rocket fuel. With the relocation of Russian military launches, more than half of which currently take off from Baikonur, these people may get some relief. However, one group of people is probably sorry to see Baikonur lose business; the region's scrap metal dealers are getting rich trading metal from the rockets' titanium alloy hulls.

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay [mirrordot.com] for [mirrordot.com] MirrorDot [mirrordot.com].

old-world chemists (alchemists)

[NRAdude]

Not to detract, but there has been sparse evidence and documentation of the Kings and Queens around the Years 1100 had their crowns casted in aluminum. I can't find the documentation at the moment, but in this dire circumstance of quoting from memory doesn't prevail the certain names of those royal families, I quote from a google'd source [ullrich-aluminium.co.nz],

HOW ALUMINIUM WAS DISCOVERED
The art of pottery making was developed in northern Iraq about 5300 B.C. The clay used for making the best pottery consisted largely of a hydrated silicate of aluminium. Certain other aluminium compounds such as "alums" were widely used by the Egyptians and Babylonians as early as 2000 B.C. In vegetable dyes, various chemical processes and for medicinal purposes. But it was generally known as the "metal of clay" and for thousands of years could not be separated by any known method from its link with other elements.

In historical terms aluminium is a relatively new metal which was isolated early in the 19th century. In 1782 the great French chemist, Lavoisier, said it was the oxide of an unknown metal. This opinion was repeated by Sir Humphrey Davy in 1808, and Sir Humphrey gave it the name "aluminum" which he felt sounded more scientific than "metal of clay". His spelling is still used in North America but elsewhere in the world the spelling "aluminium", following the suggestion of Henri Sainte-Clair Deville, is used. In 1809 Davy fused iron in contact with alumina in an electric arc to produce an iron aluminium alloy; for a split instant, before it joined the iron, aluminium existed in its free metallic state for perhaps the first time since the world was formed.

In 1825 H.C. Oerstedt, a Dane, produced a tiny sample of aluminium in the laboratory by chemical means. Twenty years later the German scientist, Frederick Wohler, produced aluminium lumps as big as pinheads. In 1854 Sainte-Clair Deville had made improvements in Wohler's method and produced aluminium globules the size of marbles. He was encouraged by Napoleon lll to produce aluminium commercially and at the Paris exhibition in 1855 aluminium bars were exhibited next to the crown jewels. It was not until 31 years later, however, that an economical way of commercial production was discovered.

On February 23, 1886, a 22-year-old American, Charles Martin Hall, worked out the basic electrolytic process still in use today. Hall had begun his experiments while still a student at Oberlin College, Ohio. He achieved his success, after graduation, with home-made apparatus in the family wood shed. He separated aluminium from the oxygen with which it is chemically combined in nature by passing an electric current through a solution of cryolite and alumina.

Almost simultaneously, Paul L.T. Heroult arrived at the same process in France. However, he did not at first recognise its importance. He worked along another line in the development of aluminium alloys. In 1888 the German chemist, Karl Joseph Bayer, was issued a German patent for an improved process for making Bayer aluminium oxide (alumina). The foundation of the aluminium age was complete. The Bayer & Hall-Heroult processes freed the world's most plentiful and versatile structural element for the use of man.

Certainly, without the speculation I tried to reference towards old-world chemists forging aluminum merchandise for a Royal prices, according to today's public records it may date to no less than 150 years of use; clearly a far contraction from the 900 more years I uncovered in a College Library's religious manuscripts.

Link seems slashdotted...

[64nDh1]

I can't get to the link for the Photo essay, but try the following URL to get to the jpegs directly instead of the Slide show page.

http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/culture/imag [eurasianet.org] es/sj2.jpg [eurasianet.org]

That's the second image, a smoking hunk of what must be a fallen rocket casing I guess.

There's 12 images in all, I've only seen the first two, but they seem to follow simple numeric order, so the others would end

.../sj3.jpg

and so on.

If anyone wants to send me a zip of the pictures if they can access them by email, I'll rehost and post the link. But as I say, right now I've only got two images.

Rehosted images.

[64nDh1]

An open directory of jpegs 1, 2, 5, 6, 10, 11 and 12. If anyone wants to fill in the gaps, forward the files to my e-mail and I'll add them later.

http://matrix.netsoc.tcd.ie/~64ndhi/SlashdotKazakh stan/ [netsoc.tcd.ie]

Re:Titanium is a pain to weld or melt in the house

[keraneuology]

Of all the exotic materials they can make rings out of, one thing she would not do was make rings out of titanium. The reason? In case of certain medical emergencies (snagged in a machine, or crashed car, or whatever), they'd need to cut the ring off to free the finger (and ultimately the entire person). But no paramedic or even hospital ward is routinely equipped with tools to cut through titanium.

Counter [e-weddingbands.com] we contacted our local hospital emergency room and asked if they were equipped to cut off a titanium ring in an emergency. Most hospital emergency rooms are prepared to handle almost anything, and ours assured us that it would be no problem for them. During our 30+ years of jewelry repair experience, we've only seen a dozen or so rings that have been cut off in hospital emergency rooms, and in most of those cases the rings had been bent out-of-round and were putting painful pressure on the finger. Titanium rings are less likely to crush or bend out-of-round, so if you shut your hand in a car door or drop a heavy object on it, it might be safer to be wearing a titanium ring than a precious metal band!

Counter 2 [cascadiadesignstudio.com] In case of an emergency, such as an injured finger, Emergency Medical Technicians, Fire Departments, and Hospital Emergency Rooms can quickly remove titanium rings. Several non-destructive methods for ring removal are available before resorting to cutting a ring. In the rare event it becomes necessary to cut off a titanium ring, emergency medical professionals carry ring cutters or rotary cut-off tools that cut through metals, including our CP and Aerospace Grade Titanium. In our testing, we found that tools that will cut through steel will also cut through titanium rings.

Counter 3 [titaniumconnection.com] Titanium rings are created with safety in mind, as there is always the possibility that a ring will need to be removed in an emergency. Tests by various manufacturers have shown that titanium rings can be manually cut with a ring cutter within a matter of minutes, and much faster using an electric ring cutting device, such as those that many paramedics use.

Counter 4 [canadianbride.com] I had heard that there is a "medical emergency" issue (i.e. they can't cut the ring off of your finger with regular ring snippers) but my friend's hubby, who is an EMT, assured me that this isn't something to be concerned about, since they have different types of cutters they can use should the need arise.

Exactly how much is that worth monetarily?

[DigiMan]

I was just curious, I was only able to see a few of the photos before the server got too bogged down..., but from the looks of the one where the guy is standing on the "space junk", I was shocked by the shear size of that thing!

Does anyone have a rough guess about how much metal is in one of those things? Also, what do you think THEY get in Kazakhstan for the Ti? compared to what we could get here in the US??? Last I checked, Ti was going for around $1 or $1.25 / lb and that is IF you can find a buyer. Acording to RecyclyingToday.com [recyclingtoday.com] there seems to be a surplus...

Just wondering if anyone has a rough idea for us scrap geeks :)

I'd hate to have one of those puppies fall in my back yard and have to say, "Yeah, I know I didn't get the best price on my scrap booster rocket, but AT LEAST I GOT A GREAT PRICE ON CAR INSURANCE!"

Re:Aluminum is verry low melting point. Here is ho

[jonored]

And that's perfectly fine for doing aluminum casting; now let's see you get aluminum from clay with it. Nobody was saying that you can't work aluminum with normal heats; it's quite a bit easier to heat than steel is, and that's perfectly doable with a little bit of air and some chunk charcoal.
BTW, the whole setup would function better if you had something like a brake drum from a car (or just about any other sort of fire-resistant pot with a hole in the bottom) and some piping to get the air coming up through the hole in the bottom. It's actually fairly easy to soften, melt, and burn steel in such an arrangement, using either chunk charcoal or coal. (real charcoal burns quite noticeably hotter, albeit faster, than briquettes.)

But anyways, enough of me ranting about the forge in my backyard.

Too many thoughts, aaaggghhh

[EtherAlchemist]

A couple of things came to mind reading the parent.

I'd have to say welding titanium is no more difficult than welding aluminum or stainless steel. They're all tricky and it takes practice.

Titanium can be difficult to work with (especially if you're not set up to do so) but you'll notice that most titanium jewelry is either formed (from wire, rod or sheet) or machined. Titanium rings/bands are machined- not cast.

Because Ti rings are machined, your local jeweler is likely unable to resize your ring. You can't size it down the way you would common alloy rings (which are cut and soldered to make smaller, stretched to make bigger) so you've got to either go back to the retailer or in some cases the manufacturer.

Aluminum was more expensive than gold, but its value is subjective, gold has been desired more than any other metal since its discovery. Side note- aluminum used to cost more because until relatively recently it was extremely expensive to extract from bauxite. (If you're interested, it's called the Bayer Process [wikipedia.org])

Unlike gold and other precious metals and alloys, I don't think titanium and other industrial metals are sold on market exchanges. There's no spot or fix for the industrial metals (that I know of.)

And lastly, my local scrap metal dealer buys Ti at $.18/pound and sells at $.24/pound. I think this is much lower than it's market value, but even o it's no wonder these farmer guys are making $$$- they have tonnage. Well, and, it's probably hard to find in that market.

Re:Titanium is a pain to weld or melt in the house

[SEE]

but consider that 1,000 years ago aluminum was a hundred times more valuable than gold

Aluminum was not known as a metal 1,000 years ago, having been discovered in 1825 and purified enough to really test its properties in 1827. But yes, until the electolytic process was developed in 1886, it was quite vaulable because it was so hard to purify.

(There were, in fact, only seven pure metals known a thousand years ago -- iron, copper, tin, gold, silver, lead, and mercury. The isolation of zinc and its recognition as a metal dates to c.1200 AD in India, and arsenic was isolated around that time in Europe.)

Re:In Soviet Russia...

[hardcard]

mirror of story/pics:

http://www.sixflagsneworleans.com/ [sixflagsneworleans.com]