Site 45 at the

Baikonur Cosmodrome The Baikonur Cosmodrome ( kk, Байқоңыр ғарыш айлағы, translit=Baiqoñyr ğaryş ailağy, ; russian: Космодром Байконур, translit=Kosmodrom Baykonur, ) is a spaceport in an area of southern Kazakhstan leased to R ...

is a launch site used by Zenit rockets. It consists of two pads, one of which is still in use. It has been the launch site for all

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

and

Russia Russia (, , ), or the Russian Federation, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia, Northern Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the ...

n government Zenit launches, along with a commercial launch conducted for

Globalstar Globalstar, Inc. is an American satellite communications company that operates a low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellation for satellite phone and low-speed data communications. The Globalstar second-generation constellation consists of 24 lo ...

in 1998, and continuing commercial launches under the

Land Launch Land Launch refers to a service product of Sea Launch SA. There is no entity or company called Land Launch. Sea Launch created the Land Launch offering to address lighter satellites directly into geosynchronous orbit or into geosynchronous transfe ...

programme. The main pad at the site is area 45/1, which was completed in 1983 following five years of construction. A second pad, area 45/2, was completed in 1990, but was destroyed by a launch failure in the same year. The first launch from site 45, using pad 1, occurred on 13 April 1985. This was a

sub-orbital A sub-orbital spaceflight is a spaceflight in which the spacecraft reaches outer space, but its trajectory intersects the atmosphere or surface of the gravitating body from which it was launched, so that it will not complete one orbital re ...

test flight of the

Zenit-2 The Zenit-2 is a Ukrainian, previously Soviet, expendable carrier rocket. First flown in 1985, it has been launched 37 times, with 6 failures. It is a member of the Zenit family of rockets and was designed by the Yuzhmash. History With 13– ...

, and the maiden flight of the Zenit rocket. The launch failed, and was followed up with a second, successful, test flight launched at 08:21

GMT Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, counted from midnight. At different times in the past, it has been calculated in different ways, including being calculated from noon; as a cons ...

on 21 June 1985. Whilst this launch was also intended to be suborbital, some debris from the launch reached

low Earth orbit A low Earth orbit (LEO) is an orbit around Earth with a period of 128 minutes or less (making at least 11.25 orbits per day) and an eccentricity less than 0.25. Most of the artificial objects in outer space are in LEO, with an altitude never mor ...

. The first launch from pad 2 occurred on 22 May 1990, when a Zenit-2 successfully orbited a

Tselina-2 Tselina () is a Russian military space-based radio surveillance system, originally developed in the former Soviet Union. It is capable of determining the exact location of radio-emitting objects and also their type, modes of operation, and how ...

ELINT Signals intelligence (SIGINT) is intelligence-gathering by interception of ''signals'', whether communications between people (communications intelligence—abbreviated to COMINT) or from electronic signals not directly used in communication ( ...

satellite. On the next launch, also from pad 2, the first stage

RD-171 The RD-170 ( rus, РД-170, Ракетный Двигатель-170, Raketnyy Dvigatel-170) is the world's most powerful and heaviest liquid-fuel rocket engine. It was designed and produced in the Soviet Union by NPO Energomash for use with the ...

engine failed five seconds after launch and the rocket fell back onto the launch pad from a height of about . The resulting explosion completely destroyed the launch pad, and was reported to have lifted a 1,000 tonne metal structure 20 metres into the air, and to have caused significant damage to lighting towers 100 metres from the pad. Zenit launches resumed from pad 1 around ten months later, pad 2 was not rebuilt. On 29 June 2007, the first Zenit-2M was launched from pad 1, followed by the first Zenit-3SLB on 28 April 2008. Facilities to support manned launches were built at both pads. These included large mobile access towers, which would have allowed the crew to board a spacecraft on top of the rocket. These towers were never used. The tower at area 45/1 is still intact, and the tower at area 45/2 is still standing, but was heavily damaged in the October 1990 explosion. The towers are not used in unmanned launch operations, as all systems are automated, and no access to the rocket is required.

References

Literature

* "Baikonur. Korolev. Yangel." - M. I. Kuznetsk, Voronezh: IPF "Voronezh", 1997, * "Look back and look ahead. Notes of a military engineer" - Rjazhsky A. A., 2004, SC. first, the publishing house of the "Heroes of the Fatherland" * «A breakthrough in space» - Konstantin Vasilyevich Gerchik, M: LLC "Veles", 1994, - * «At risk,» - A. A. Toul, Kaluga, "the Golden path", 2001, - * "Bank of the Universe" - edited by Boltenko A. C., Kyiv, 2014., publishing house "Phoenix", * "My first life" - Е. A. Anufrienko. {{Use British English, date=January 2014 Baikonur Cosmodrome

See also

References

Literature