Space Graveyard on Earth

The news reported the successful launch of a human spacecraft, and all of humanity shared the joy. Rocket liftoff and booster stripping go hand in hand, but most people focus on the ascent and ignore the fall. Where do these boosters fall after they have burned up their fuel?

　　The Baikonur Cosmodrome, the first to be built, is full of great achievements. It was the world's first, and largest, space launch center. It launched the world's first artificial satellite into space; it sent Gagarin into space, making him the first human astronaut in space ......

　　And 1,000 kilometers away from the launch site, there is an otherwise quiet area of the Altai Mountains. It is a natural ecological steppe with granite terrain. The steppe area is vast, but the houses and residential population are sparse, and from time to time you can see a few Siberian wild goats and musk deer leaping out.

　　One is an aviation base that brings together the world's highest technology, and the other is one of the most remote and impoverished regions in the world. What connects the two is the busy rocket launch operation.

　　A cascade of accelerating boosts propel the launcher into space. With each acceleration, the rocket strips off a portion of its booster. When the rocket's structural "dismemberment" is complete, most of the boosters consume their fuel and return to the ground as wreckage due to Earth's gravity. Most of these rocket wrecks and stripped boosters fall into the Altai Mountains.

　　According to statistics, more than 2,500 tons of spacecraft wreckage have landed in the area since the launch site was opened. More than 1,500 residents of the Altai Mountains have become accustomed to these rocket drops.

　　The wreckage that fell in the Altai Mountains was at first vigorously recovered, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of Russia's space power, there was no time to clean it up. This was a great bargain for the mountain people, as the superior titanium-aluminum alloy, copper wire and other parts were a "godsend" of excellent metal materials, so they rewelded them into tools and used them in their lives.

　　So in the poor Altai Mountains, you may see rocket shells used to make the roofs of chicken stands, farm tools, etc. Maybe you can even see a Russian aviation logo on a child's sled, which is not a copycat.

　　Ironically, these resources, which bring extra income to the local population, are also brewing deadly disasters. It didn't take long for the people of the Altai Mountains to develop perverse diseases. A number of endocrine and blood disorders began to occur frequently among the population, and children's health declined severely.

　　It turned out that the rocket fuel used was a liquid propellant, and the components, such as meta-dimethylhydrazine, dinitrogen tetroxide, and heptane compounds, were highly toxic. When booster debris falls on the grasslands, there is usually as much as 10 percent of fuel left over.

　　Sometimes, the remaining fuel can leave rocket components burning on the dry prairie. Not only does this pose a risk to recovery efforts, the highly toxic liquid can also leak into the soil. In this way, the food grown and water extracted by local residents is contaminated.

　　Dozens of liters of fuel are sprayed over several square kilometers of land or into rivers. If animals pass by and accidentally lick more than one mouth, they will be poisoned and killed.

　　In fact, space graveyards like the one in the Altai Mountains are not unique.

　　NASA's Kennedy Space Center is located in Florida, and most of the debris from this launch falls directly into the Atlantic Ocean.

　　A large uninhabited area of deep ocean in the South Pacific is also a space graveyard.

　　Behind the world's impressive technological feats, the tragedy of the Altai Mountain region is also finally coming into focus. Russia was earlier planning a new launch site, the Eastern Space Launch Complex, with the aim of mitigating the pollution situation in the Altai region, while they developed a new launch vehicle using liquid oxygen and kerosene as propellants to replace the Proton rocket.

　　The exciting and advanced technology also hides a dark and backward place that is little known. The cyberpunk of the science fiction world projected onto reality may imply the heartache of human poverty, disease, and death.