Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Quite Possibly The Most Stupid Stunt You'll See

ARS Technica reports the story of two "adventurers" whose idea was to break into a Russian military base in Kazakhstan where the decrepit old Soviet Buran Space Shuttles are decaying away.

Mrs. Graybeard hasn't worked on the Cape since the late '90s, so maybe I've got things wrong, but in the days before 9/11 security on the Cape didn't typically shoot trespassers.  It's not like they couldn't shoot gate runners, but the few incidents I heard about, the idiot was always some bozo tourist who thought he'd run the gate.  The guards would shoot out their tires so they couldn't go any farther - or at least so they got the message they shouldn't go any farther.  (Shooting the people probably involved too much paperwork).  Maybe in the post 9/11, TSA at the Greyhound bus stop world, they do shoot people trying to run the gates, but I honestly don't know. 

I just didn't think the Russian or Kazakh guards suffered fools as patiently as US guards.  These guys drove out to a remote corner of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where Soyuz rockets are still launched, and broke into the buildings.
Now, two adventurers who post videos on YouTube and style themselves as "Exploring the Unbeaten Path" have posted a dramatic video after sneaking onto the well-guarded grounds of the Kazakhstan spaceport at night. The duo spent the next day in the hidden hangar of the Buran vehicles taking impressive photos, videos, and capturing some pretty amazing drone footage of two mostly completed orbiters.
There's a 15 minute video they created of their adventure, if you're into that.  I wasn't interested enough to watch it. 


4 comments:

  1. Sneak into a Russian base? Survey says... Nyet!

    Had a friend who worked for a hardware supplier who used to drive stuff up to the Cape. One day he was up there trying to deliver bolts, really big bolts, that came 2 per a really nice packing crate that looked suspiciously like a high-quality briefcase. Took a wrong turn one he was on the base, and got twisted around. He knew he was in the wrong place when out of the swamp appeared a whole herd of armed Humvees and a helicopter. He said he spent more time cleaning the crap out of his pants than he did explaining what had happened, and that took forever.

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  2. we could barely keep the shuttle flying, how in the hell did the russians think they could make their stolen copy work?

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    1. One of those Rules of Life is, "nothing is too hard for the man who doesn't have to do it". They asked the managers if they could keep flying and the managers said, "no problem!"

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    2. But it did work, they just didn't launch any people in it. It flew once unmanned, did two orbits and landed automatically. That one was destroyed in 2002 when its poorly maintained hangar collapsed on it.

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