Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You!

theodp writes "'We were all foolish enough to go on this adventure,' Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the assembled Brainiacs at Google's Solve for X event last week, recalling the time he and Google co-founder Larry Page took their Gulfstream on a $100K journey to watch a 2008 Soyuz launch in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. 'If the rocket blows up, we're all dead,' Sergey overheard a Russian guard say. 'It was incredibly close,' Sergey continued. 'We drove in toward this rocket and there were hundreds of people all going the other way. It was really an astonishing sight. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. It's really not at all comparable to the American launches that I've seen...because those are like five miles away behind a mountain, and the Russians are not as concerned with safety.' Sergey received film credit for the recently-opened Man on a Mission, a documentary on the Russian Soyuz mission that wound up putting Ultima creator Richard Garriott into orbit (for $30 million) instead of changing the course of Google history."

Not Necessarily Dead

[Waffle Iron]

In 1983, a Soyuz rocket exploded on the launch pad. The crew was lifted to safety by the launch escape system, and there don't seem to be reports about any casualties on the ground due to this this incident.

Re:Greenhouse gas emissions

[dunkelfalke]

Get your facts straight. USSR has existed for 73 years and despite many people think otherwise, Stalin died in 1953 and Stalinism died with him, thanks to Khrushchev.

Re:Greenhouse gas emissions

[jamstar7]

The cleanest rocket fuel is liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen as the 'oxydizer'. The reason they use hydrazine is, l-hyd isn't that easy to handle. Fact is, it's a real pain in the ass. You have to store it in a Thermos tank, vented for the boiloff. You can't hope to store it for more than a few hours in a 'fuel tank' on a rocket. Hydrazine can be handled in ambient room temperature, it's already liquid. Saves weight as well on the tankage, you only have to insulate the liquid oxygen. And let's not even go into the problems of cryogenically frozen pump components when dealing with pumping l-hyd. Lox is bad enough, but l-hyd is liquid at -253C thereabouts, almost absolute zero. Materials do strange things at that temperature range...

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