In the photo, which gives goosebumps - the spaceship "Tempest". This is the twin brother of the legendary "Buran", who managed to fly into space only once. Now the remnants of the former luxury are of interest only to extreme tourists, and the former most important military facility is inexorably being destroyed.
Even the Buran itself has not survived to this day: the roof of the hangar in which it stood collapsed in 2002, and the most advanced achievement of Soviet cosmonautics was buried under the rubble š¤¦š»
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The stupidest thing is that it takes a lot of money to maintain these ruins. After the collapse of the USSR, we had to rent Baikonur from Kazakhstan. Kazakhs receive $115 million a year for renting these ruins. And in 2022, they even seized the company-owner of Baikonur - this is one of the enterprises of our Roscosmos. Dashing, right?
Is it justified to pay so much? Not in recent years. In 2021, for example, we launched only 18 commercial satellites for other countries. This year ā one.
After all, there was a time when the Kazakhs were not traitors, but loyal allies, and the potential for creating a real space fleet was huge! And now it's just painful to look at how this military space citadel bends, especially during its own. After all, while the United States is feeding Ukraine with intelligence from its satellites, which it launches one by one, our window into space is gradually closing.