April 11, 2019 at 09:56Space 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 into orbit to 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 resource and are written off to the scrap. The ISS alone circles and circles above the Earth, as if denoting our presence there, like a customs post on a distant deserted border, which few people care about.
I got 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 military unit. Out of our huge conscription of 3,000 people, only 27 remained in the training. We tried on sergeant epaulets and wandered around the training complex in anticipation of “buyers” - officers who would take us to the place of further service. They envied those who remained in training at the command posts: their future was determined, ours was completely foggy. After 5 months, the Chernobyl cloud will cover the training, and our colleagues left there will be engaged not so much in training the next shift of soldiers as in decontamination of the terrain.
The officer who selected 4 of the remaining 27. A long road with a change in Moscow is just a few hours, 3 stations along the ring from Belorusskaya to Komsomolskaya, from the memories - only the ticket office of the Kazan station with a bunch of people in line. The Moscow-Tashkent train, where all the passengers stuffed to the eyeballs of a reserved seat carriage, except for us, are demolition-construction battalions traveling home to the south. And the captain accompanying us, for all questions about where we are going, answering - you will see there. Nothing - a pretty demobil-Uzbek smiled at us across the table - everyone has served and you will serve. And only in the car’s vestibule two days after the journey late in the evening before disembarking at Tyura-Tam station, the captain said: “You have 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. Even earlier, Kapustin Yar was built in the Volga Valley. But, having started the construction of the Kyzyl-Kum semi-desert in Kazakhstan in 1955, we launched the first satellite in 1957, sent the station to the moon in 1959, and in 1961 the first cosmonaut of the planet, Yuri Gagarin, was in space.
On all maps of the USSR, Baikonur was shown kilometers 200 north of its current position. Damn secrecy! - it’s immediately clear that no one will put the city in the desert not on the river (as Ilf and Petrov laughed at it back in the 30s: We were sitting in a cafe in Yalta on the shore 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 called Leninsk, or platform 10. At least fifty sites are scattered along the vast territory of the cosmodrome, but the maximum number is the 254th runway of heavy aircraft and, in fact, “ Burana. " Leninsk itself at that time was a huge city with a hundred thousandth population, beaches along the Syr Darya river, shops, clubs, a branch of the Moscow Aviation Institute and the mandatory VOSTOK rocket on a pedestal set upright, not like at VDNH,
Every morning, the officers ’people advance onto motor vehicles - this is the name of small echelons of 3-5-7 cars that carry them around the sites. The guides in the wagons are also conscript soldiers and railway troops. But this is a small part of the Baikonur army, the basis is, of course, the construction battalion, space troops and the commandant’s office. Officially, there were no space troops as such in the USSR. On the tabs, the personnel were rocket launchers, then, since 1987, pilots, and the name was either GUKOS (Main Directorate of Space Facilities of the Ministry of Defense), then UNKS (Office of the Head of Space Facilities). When the space forces were part of the Strategic Missile Forces, even the names of their commanders coincided - Maximov, only the commander of the missile forces was the army general, and the space commanders - colonel general (is it really the same secrecy? Or is it a coincidence). In fact, graduates of many military schools, even submarine officers (apparently, there were similar systems in submarines) were sent to Baikonur to serve, and for some time they walked around Baikonur in marine uniform and raked sand with flares. Sort of desert ships.
Baikonur was not only a space training ground. There were many mines with strategic missiles on it - many of them were blown up in the 70s, after the signing of the Soviet-American treaty OSV-1, and it was blown up so that it could be seen from satellites. But the main thing, of course, is space. Platforms, platforms, platforms. Launch complexes, assembly complexes, assembly and test complexes (MICs), huge refueling facilities, vibration stands ... Airfields and railway tracks for bringing a huge amount of equipment (Energia-Buran launch complex alone) - 5 floors of underground structures down to the base of the launch table).
Each site is a piece of life torn from the desert. The same high-rise buildings are hotels for business travelers and barracks typical of the entire USSR and other structures of military units - headquarters, club, canteen. A bit of green on the chernozem poured over sand and clay, like everything here - imported. Only camel thorns and the famous Baikonur tulips, with fleshy leaves similar to a cactus without needles, grew on the soils of Kyzyl Kum, but their eyelids were very short, no more than 2 weeks. A sharply continental climate — the transition from winter to summer and vice versa took about ten days of 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 television report shown at the next space launch is always the same. Here the service farms depart, after a few seconds the refueling mast shoots out, the spacecraft rises slightly above the launch pad, so that the supports with counterweights, turning on the axes, leave from under it, and then a jerk into space. Watching this picture almost every 2 weeks from the roof of the barracks, we already knew that everything was a bit wrong. Service farms depart in half an hour and lay down almost horizontally. The top of the rocket, depending on whether the crew is flying with people or an ordinary satellite, has a different color. On a ship with astronauts, a whisk of powder bombs is attached to the spire crowning the rocket, or САС - emergency rescue system, An analogue of an aircraft catapult. It was she who saved the 1983 T-10 crew with Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov on board, lifting the capsule with the astronauts to a height of 1 kilometer away from the rocket that exploded at the launch.
The space program works like a clock. The newspapers are reporting the next start on the last page in a note the size of a matchbox. Almost no accidents over many years - all the stories about this are only in the memoirs of officers during patrols in Leninsk. About the explosion at the start in 1960, which killed 70 people, including the first commander of the Strategic Missile Forces, Mitrofan Nedelin. About the predecessor of Lunokhod-2 that exploded immediately after the launch, the wreckage of which fell asleep as the rotozeys were watching after the launch - after many successful starts, people completely lost caution and watched everything in close proximity. About a separate corner of the cemetery, where all those who died at the start of the lunar rocket H1 are buried. But the stories, of course, are not only about this. The launch of four research stations on Mars in a row - 90 days of continuous operation at site 95; there is even a postage stamp with the image of the red planet and the stations "Mars-4" ... "Mars-7" against its background. About the future of the space program, when it takes only 90 minutes from the moment the launch decision is made to the rocket’s departure into space (for other then-launched rockets, the prelaunch time is measured in days - from 2 from Soyuz to 28 at Energia). About future space stations - just at that time, the Salyut station program ended and the new-generation Mir station was launched.
There are a lot of launching sites. The one next to us is the famous deuce, the Gagarin launch. But there are 32 more from where the same Soyuz rockets go into space. There is a Proton heavy launch vehicle, for which two launch complexes were built at sites 95 and 200 - a twin and a quad. There are mines, of which on combat missiles it is possible to launch light satellites into space. And there are a large number of structures under our future Shuttle - Buran. A huge start-up stand, 250th, and a twin launch complex that is under construction, facility 858/110, which we will serve for a year and a half of service, a MIC with 20-level gates and a huge cyclopean installer to deliver the ship to the launch complex, driven by two twin locomotives along two parallel tracks at a distance of 15 meters from each other.
The launch complex for Energy-Buran is not a new one. 20 years ago it was created for a 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 to gain the required thrust. The missile was unsuccessful, or maybe, as KB employees say, it simply was not allowed to finish. One way or another, 4 explosions during the tests immediately after the launch were a sentence. The project was curtailed, and we didn’t have time on the moon before the Americans — it was already 1974. The states were rehabilitated for the lag in space exploration, but almost simultaneously with the United States we began the development of reusable next-generation spacecraft.
Every year, military school officers arriving in Baikonur simply in packs. There were more officers in the staff list of the space troops than soldiers. Eight department engineers (with six soldiers) applied for one place as the department head, captain's position. I have rarely met such enthusiastic and dedicated people in my life. The newly arrived lieutenants looked with enthusiasm at the lightning rods mustache sticking out from the horizon and asked - is it there, there is a launch complex? Many underwent cadet practice at the cosmodrome, but most often it was a small northern training ground in Plesetsk (the main supplier of officers for the space forces was the Mozhaisky Leningrad VIKI, but also “adjacents” from missile forces schools in Kharkov, Serpukhov, and sometimes officers also came submarines).
A full-fledged start-up stand, platform 250, was created to break in a new hydrogen engine of the Energia heavy-duty launch vehicle. To put a large mass into orbit on traditional chemical fuel (oxygen + kerosene), as the experience of the same H1 - the dead end path showed, it was necessary to make a modern hydrogen engine. What the father of the German FAU-2 Werner von Braun did for the American lunar Saturn 5, 2 of the 3 stages of which were powered by hydrogen fuel. The task is more than nontrivial. Liquid hydrogen is difficult to store (you need a cryogenic center) and even harder to transport - in a mixture with oxygen, it gives an explosive mixture that explodes from the slightest spark. One hundred tons of liquid hydrogen and eight hundred or more tons of oxygen - the starting refueling of Energia. Gases in a liquid state wash the ship’s skeleton, improving its strength properties. To fill hydrogen from the tank, air is first displaced with inert gases - nitrogen and helium. An explosion of such an amount of fuel is Hiroshima's power, except without environmental pollution; hydrogen is a highly environmentally friendly fuel.
The speed of construction was simply amazing. Thousands of civilian specialists from headquarters in Kazan, Leningrad, Kuibyshev, and Moscow walked around the cosmodrome, who methodically handed over all launch systems to the military, transferred endless volumes of documentation filled with huge drawings, wiring diagrams, and the purpose of control panels. Sometimes, for example, I came across drawings of other launch complexes, which I considered as maps of unknown islands from adventure novels. In the steppe lay a huge number of all kinds of parts and mechanisms from the last lunar launch - old appliances, protected lighting lamps. The dome of protection from the lunar H1 stood in the neighboring building battalion as a shell of the stage. The names of the series of devices that came across on some debris were amusing - all the equipment at the old lunar and new Buranovsky launch had continuous numbering (development was separated more than 10 years)! Planned economy and the same academic institutions working for the space program.
1986 - the year of full autonomous testing of the future system. At the start, they set the exact layout of the ship with real engines, but non-space casing. We went through a full cycle - fuel injection, engine purge, drain. In my memory there is still a burning tongue of flame from a broken fueling pipe on the screen of a technological television system; Automation quickly cut off the problem area. On the night of the engine’s purge, the entire training ground sat without light; everything was taken over by the start. The barracks were lit with a kerosene lamp, but there was a giant sheaf of light in the steppe: the launch complex with the ship on it was lit by all six towers with 140 five-kilowatt lamps on each.
The abundance of senior officials over time ceased to be something out of the ordinary. In one of the 6 halls of the underground structure that we served, I ran into Colonel General German Titov, astronaut number 2 and Gagarin's understudy in his first flight into space. There wasn’t the audacity to ask for an autograph - usually the astronauts signed directly on the military card. Inspectors came from Moscow, and at the words "We are the people of Barmin himself!" the generals became quietly at the front — Barmin, the general designer of launch complexes, was one of the Korolev's “Council of Chief Designers”. In the end, Gorbachev himself arrived, and for him a rocket was put on the Gagarin launch, after it was removed. It was in May, before the very first start of Energy. Knowing the bad zeal of his subordinates, Mikhal Sergeyevich ordered not to let the rocket go on the next anniversary, and once again 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 launch the first launch of a new carrier without a ship. Incidentally, this was a very important fundamental difference between the Soviet reusable program and the American one. At the start of the Shuttle, the spacecraft’s engine is running, helping the main tank and two side boosters gain first space speed. Energy doesn’t need a Buran engine at all - the thrust of the main tank and 4 side boosters are enough. As a result, the carrying capacity is several times greater - from 30 with a small tonne at the Shuttle to 108 in the limit at Energia. The cause of the Shuttle explosion was a side solid fuel accelerator. The Energy Sidebar proved to be an extremely successful traditional liquid-fuel rocket and, under the name Zenit, flies to this day as a medium-class carrier.
The first launch was scheduled with the Polyus-K space block as a load. For the start, it was decided to use the bench complex - platform 250, as a more finished one (on the 110th installation of the right start was completed, and farms and systems designed for landing the crew and missing on the 250th were not needed this time). The export of Energia with the Pole to the start took place on the night of winter to spring - February 28, 1987, and was accompanied by completely wild snowfall. However, what is bad weather next to a ship with a starting weight of 2000 tons. With the full-time behavior of all systems, the ship was supposed to go into space after 28 days. However, tests, delays, brought the launch time to May. Even greater delays would require the ship to be removed again to the MIC and to deal with problems there already. As a result, the launch was scheduled for May 15.
On this day everyone was evacuated. All structures within the radius of destruction were locked - the entire personnel advanced on foot to a remote site, away from the 10-kilometer zone around the start, the experience of testing N1 was taken into account. Between the site, where we spent all of May 15 in idleness, 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 all day.
At six in the evening under the bulk of the ship there was a flash of fire. “Energy” began to rise smoothly, accompanied by an unreal beauty with a flame of blazing hydrogen of an absolutely white color. The handsome ship went into the sky almost silently, leaving a small trail of fog.
The next day, the entire summer rainfall spilled on Baikonur.
On one of these days, the Central Administration of the USSR for the first time showed the launch of the ship and discovered the fact that we still have launch sites, except for the Gagarin one. The camera was positioned so that in the focus of the famous “deuce” on the horizon were visible huge structures of Energia-Buran launches.
A week later, I was discharged. Colleagues brought home souvenirs - crumpled pieces of metal structures of the launch complex, scorched by a flown away rocket.
In another year and a half - day to day after the first launch - Energia and Buran started in unmanned mode. The ship flew around the Earth twice and boarded the Yubileiny airdrome just 5 kilometers from the start. Spare landing strips in Kamchatka and in the Crimea near Simferopol could also accept a space shuttle. But there were no more flights.
In May 2002, the roof of an abandoned assembly complex at site 112 collapsed in Baikonur, burying the last operating Buran model, pride and the top of the Soviet space program.
It hurts me.
I got 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 military unit. Out of our huge conscription of 3,000 people, only 27 remained in the training. We tried on sergeant epaulets and wandered around the training complex in anticipation of “buyers” - officers who would take us to the place of further service. They envied those who remained in training at the command posts: their future was determined, ours was completely foggy. After 5 months, the Chernobyl cloud will cover the training, and our colleagues left there will be engaged not so much in training the next shift of soldiers as in decontamination of the terrain.
The officer who selected 4 of the remaining 27. A long road with a change in Moscow is just a few hours, 3 stations along the ring from Belorusskaya to Komsomolskaya, from the memories - only the ticket office of the Kazan station with a bunch of people in line. The Moscow-Tashkent train, where all the passengers stuffed to the eyeballs of a reserved seat carriage, except for us, are demolition-construction battalions traveling home to the south. And the captain accompanying us, for all questions about where we are going, answering - you will see there. Nothing - a pretty demobil-Uzbek smiled at us across the table - everyone has served and you will serve. And only in the car’s vestibule two days after the journey late in the evening before disembarking at Tyura-Tam station, the captain said: “You have 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. Even earlier, Kapustin Yar was built in the Volga Valley. But, having started the construction of the Kyzyl-Kum semi-desert in Kazakhstan in 1955, we launched the first satellite in 1957, sent the station to the moon in 1959, and in 1961 the first cosmonaut of the planet, Yuri Gagarin, was in space.
On all maps of the USSR, Baikonur was shown kilometers 200 north of its current position. Damn secrecy! - it’s immediately clear that no one will put the city in the desert not on the river (as Ilf and Petrov laughed at it back in the 30s: We were sitting in a cafe in Yalta on the shore 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 called Leninsk, or platform 10. At least fifty sites are scattered along the vast territory of the cosmodrome, but the maximum number is the 254th runway of heavy aircraft and, in fact, “ Burana. " Leninsk itself at that time was a huge city with a hundred thousandth population, beaches along the Syr Darya river, shops, clubs, a branch of the Moscow Aviation Institute and the mandatory VOSTOK rocket on a pedestal set upright, not like at VDNH,
Every morning, the officers ’people advance onto motor vehicles - this is the name of small echelons of 3-5-7 cars that carry them around the sites. The guides in the wagons are also conscript soldiers and railway troops. But this is a small part of the Baikonur army, the basis is, of course, the construction battalion, space troops and the commandant’s office. Officially, there were no space troops as such in the USSR. On the tabs, the personnel were rocket launchers, then, since 1987, pilots, and the name was either GUKOS (Main Directorate of Space Facilities of the Ministry of Defense), then UNKS (Office of the Head of Space Facilities). When the space forces were part of the Strategic Missile Forces, even the names of their commanders coincided - Maximov, only the commander of the missile forces was the army general, and the space commanders - colonel general (is it really the same secrecy? Or is it a coincidence). In fact, graduates of many military schools, even submarine officers (apparently, there were similar systems in submarines) were sent to Baikonur to serve, and for some time they walked around Baikonur in marine uniform and raked sand with flares. Sort of desert ships.
Baikonur was not only a space training ground. There were many mines with strategic missiles on it - many of them were blown up in the 70s, after the signing of the Soviet-American treaty OSV-1, and it was blown up so that it could be seen from satellites. But the main thing, of course, is space. Platforms, platforms, platforms. Launch complexes, assembly complexes, assembly and test complexes (MICs), huge refueling facilities, vibration stands ... Airfields and railway tracks for bringing a huge amount of equipment (Energia-Buran launch complex alone) - 5 floors of underground structures down to the base of the launch table).
Each site is a piece of life torn from the desert. The same high-rise buildings are hotels for business travelers and barracks typical of the entire USSR and other structures of military units - headquarters, club, canteen. A bit of green on the chernozem poured over sand and clay, like everything here - imported. Only camel thorns and the famous Baikonur tulips, with fleshy leaves similar to a cactus without needles, grew on the soils of Kyzyl Kum, but their eyelids were very short, no more than 2 weeks. A sharply continental climate — the transition from winter to summer and vice versa took about ten days of 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 television report shown at the next space launch is always the same. Here the service farms depart, after a few seconds the refueling mast shoots out, the spacecraft rises slightly above the launch pad, so that the supports with counterweights, turning on the axes, leave from under it, and then a jerk into space. Watching this picture almost every 2 weeks from the roof of the barracks, we already knew that everything was a bit wrong. Service farms depart in half an hour and lay down almost horizontally. The top of the rocket, depending on whether the crew is flying with people or an ordinary satellite, has a different color. On a ship with astronauts, a whisk of powder bombs is attached to the spire crowning the rocket, or САС - emergency rescue system, An analogue of an aircraft catapult. It was she who saved the 1983 T-10 crew with Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov on board, lifting the capsule with the astronauts to a height of 1 kilometer away from the rocket that exploded at the launch.
The space program works like a clock. The newspapers are reporting the next start on the last page in a note the size of a matchbox. Almost no accidents over many years - all the stories about this are only in the memoirs of officers during patrols in Leninsk. About the explosion at the start in 1960, which killed 70 people, including the first commander of the Strategic Missile Forces, Mitrofan Nedelin. About the predecessor of Lunokhod-2 that exploded immediately after the launch, the wreckage of which fell asleep as the rotozeys were watching after the launch - after many successful starts, people completely lost caution and watched everything in close proximity. About a separate corner of the cemetery, where all those who died at the start of the lunar rocket H1 are buried. But the stories, of course, are not only about this. The launch of four research stations on Mars in a row - 90 days of continuous operation at site 95; there is even a postage stamp with the image of the red planet and the stations "Mars-4" ... "Mars-7" against its background. About the future of the space program, when it takes only 90 minutes from the moment the launch decision is made to the rocket’s departure into space (for other then-launched rockets, the prelaunch time is measured in days - from 2 from Soyuz to 28 at Energia). About future space stations - just at that time, the Salyut station program ended and the new-generation Mir station was launched.
There are a lot of launching sites. The one next to us is the famous deuce, the Gagarin launch. But there are 32 more from where the same Soyuz rockets go into space. There is a Proton heavy launch vehicle, for which two launch complexes were built at sites 95 and 200 - a twin and a quad. There are mines, of which on combat missiles it is possible to launch light satellites into space. And there are a large number of structures under our future Shuttle - Buran. A huge start-up stand, 250th, and a twin launch complex that is under construction, facility 858/110, which we will serve for a year and a half of service, a MIC with 20-level gates and a huge cyclopean installer to deliver the ship to the launch complex, driven by two twin locomotives along two parallel tracks at a distance of 15 meters from each other.
The launch complex for Energy-Buran is not a new one. 20 years ago it was created for a 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 to gain the required thrust. The missile was unsuccessful, or maybe, as KB employees say, it simply was not allowed to finish. One way or another, 4 explosions during the tests immediately after the launch were a sentence. The project was curtailed, and we didn’t have time on the moon before the Americans — it was already 1974. The states were rehabilitated for the lag in space exploration, but almost simultaneously with the United States we began the development of reusable next-generation spacecraft.
Every year, military school officers arriving in Baikonur simply in packs. There were more officers in the staff list of the space troops than soldiers. Eight department engineers (with six soldiers) applied for one place as the department head, captain's position. I have rarely met such enthusiastic and dedicated people in my life. The newly arrived lieutenants looked with enthusiasm at the lightning rods mustache sticking out from the horizon and asked - is it there, there is a launch complex? Many underwent cadet practice at the cosmodrome, but most often it was a small northern training ground in Plesetsk (the main supplier of officers for the space forces was the Mozhaisky Leningrad VIKI, but also “adjacents” from missile forces schools in Kharkov, Serpukhov, and sometimes officers also came submarines).
A full-fledged start-up stand, platform 250, was created to break in a new hydrogen engine of the Energia heavy-duty launch vehicle. To put a large mass into orbit on traditional chemical fuel (oxygen + kerosene), as the experience of the same H1 - the dead end path showed, it was necessary to make a modern hydrogen engine. What the father of the German FAU-2 Werner von Braun did for the American lunar Saturn 5, 2 of the 3 stages of which were powered by hydrogen fuel. The task is more than nontrivial. Liquid hydrogen is difficult to store (you need a cryogenic center) and even harder to transport - in a mixture with oxygen, it gives an explosive mixture that explodes from the slightest spark. One hundred tons of liquid hydrogen and eight hundred or more tons of oxygen - the starting refueling of Energia. Gases in a liquid state wash the ship’s skeleton, improving its strength properties. To fill hydrogen from the tank, air is first displaced with inert gases - nitrogen and helium. An explosion of such an amount of fuel is Hiroshima's power, except without environmental pollution; hydrogen is a highly environmentally friendly fuel.
The speed of construction was simply amazing. Thousands of civilian specialists from headquarters in Kazan, Leningrad, Kuibyshev, and Moscow walked around the cosmodrome, who methodically handed over all launch systems to the military, transferred endless volumes of documentation filled with huge drawings, wiring diagrams, and the purpose of control panels. Sometimes, for example, I came across drawings of other launch complexes, which I considered as maps of unknown islands from adventure novels. In the steppe lay a huge number of all kinds of parts and mechanisms from the last lunar launch - old appliances, protected lighting lamps. The dome of protection from the lunar H1 stood in the neighboring building battalion as a shell of the stage. The names of the series of devices that came across on some debris were amusing - all the equipment at the old lunar and new Buranovsky launch had continuous numbering (development was separated more than 10 years)! Planned economy and the same academic institutions working for the space program.
1986 - the year of full autonomous testing of the future system. At the start, they set the exact layout of the ship with real engines, but non-space casing. We went through a full cycle - fuel injection, engine purge, drain. In my memory there is still a burning tongue of flame from a broken fueling pipe on the screen of a technological television system; Automation quickly cut off the problem area. On the night of the engine’s purge, the entire training ground sat without light; everything was taken over by the start. The barracks were lit with a kerosene lamp, but there was a giant sheaf of light in the steppe: the launch complex with the ship on it was lit by all six towers with 140 five-kilowatt lamps on each.
The abundance of senior officials over time ceased to be something out of the ordinary. In one of the 6 halls of the underground structure that we served, I ran into Colonel General German Titov, astronaut number 2 and Gagarin's understudy in his first flight into space. There wasn’t the audacity to ask for an autograph - usually the astronauts signed directly on the military card. Inspectors came from Moscow, and at the words "We are the people of Barmin himself!" the generals became quietly at the front — Barmin, the general designer of launch complexes, was one of the Korolev's “Council of Chief Designers”. In the end, Gorbachev himself arrived, and for him a rocket was put on the Gagarin launch, after it was removed. It was in May, before the very first start of Energy. Knowing the bad zeal of his subordinates, Mikhal Sergeyevich ordered not to let the rocket go on the next anniversary, and once again 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 launch the first launch of a new carrier without a ship. Incidentally, this was a very important fundamental difference between the Soviet reusable program and the American one. At the start of the Shuttle, the spacecraft’s engine is running, helping the main tank and two side boosters gain first space speed. Energy doesn’t need a Buran engine at all - the thrust of the main tank and 4 side boosters are enough. As a result, the carrying capacity is several times greater - from 30 with a small tonne at the Shuttle to 108 in the limit at Energia. The cause of the Shuttle explosion was a side solid fuel accelerator. The Energy Sidebar proved to be an extremely successful traditional liquid-fuel rocket and, under the name Zenit, flies to this day as a medium-class carrier.
The first launch was scheduled with the Polyus-K space block as a load. For the start, it was decided to use the bench complex - platform 250, as a more finished one (on the 110th installation of the right start was completed, and farms and systems designed for landing the crew and missing on the 250th were not needed this time). The export of Energia with the Pole to the start took place on the night of winter to spring - February 28, 1987, and was accompanied by completely wild snowfall. However, what is bad weather next to a ship with a starting weight of 2000 tons. With the full-time behavior of all systems, the ship was supposed to go into space after 28 days. However, tests, delays, brought the launch time to May. Even greater delays would require the ship to be removed again to the MIC and to deal with problems there already. As a result, the launch was scheduled for May 15.
On this day everyone was evacuated. All structures within the radius of destruction were locked - the entire personnel advanced on foot to a remote site, away from the 10-kilometer zone around the start, the experience of testing N1 was taken into account. Between the site, where we spent all of May 15 in idleness, 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 all day.
At six in the evening under the bulk of the ship there was a flash of fire. “Energy” began to rise smoothly, accompanied by an unreal beauty with a flame of blazing hydrogen of an absolutely white color. The handsome ship went into the sky almost silently, leaving a small trail of fog.
The next day, the entire summer rainfall spilled on Baikonur.
On one of these days, the Central Administration of the USSR for the first time showed the launch of the ship and discovered the fact that we still have launch sites, except for the Gagarin one. The camera was positioned so that in the focus of the famous “deuce” on the horizon were visible huge structures of Energia-Buran launches.
A week later, I was discharged. Colleagues brought home souvenirs - crumpled pieces of metal structures of the launch complex, scorched by a flown away rocket.
In another year and a half - day to day after the first launch - Energia and Buran started in unmanned mode. The ship flew around the Earth twice and boarded the Yubileiny airdrome just 5 kilometers from the start. Spare landing strips in Kamchatka and in the Crimea near Simferopol could also accept a space shuttle. But there were no more flights.
In May 2002, the roof of an abandoned assembly complex at site 112 collapsed in Baikonur, burying the last operating Buran model, pride and the top of the Soviet space program.
It hurts me.