PITY the people who live around Baikonur. Whenever a rocket takes off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Russia’s biggest launching complex on the steppes of Kazakhstan, they suffer the fallout. The rockets eject their fuel tanks and booster engines before they reach orbit, and those who live under the flight path can be bombarded several times a month by flaming spacecraft wreckage. It’s not unusual for the debris to crash straight through their roofs.
Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen has dubbed the area “the spaceship junkyard”. One of his photographs shows villagers in the nearby Altai mountains, surrounded by a cloud of…
