Space secrets
French photographer and urban explorer Jonk finds
himself drawn to abandoned places, but no previous
venture was as high-stakes as the (unauthorised) trip
he made into the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This enclave
inside Kazakhstan is where Russia continues to run the
space programme that began under the USSR. Away
from the current launch sites, and visited by occasional
patrols, are a series of rusting hangars that contain the
relics of a venture barely known to the outside world:
the Soviet attempt to mirror the US Space Shuttle.
Only one Buran (‘Snowstorm’) spaceplane ever madeit into orbit, on a test flight in 1988, before the collapse
of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the cancellation of
that programme. But two other Buran prototypes still
lie in their hangar, picked at by scrap-metal thieves,
with Soviet-era manuals littered around. Jonk and his
helpers hiked into the exclusion zone under darkness
and watched for patrols as they camped out in the
derelict buildings. The resulting book is now in print.
Baikonur: Vestiges of the Soviet Space Programme
is a rare photo record of a future that could have been.
Find out more at jonk-photography.comHidden away since the fall of the Soviet Union, two space shuttles lay unseen
by outside eyes until a small team embarked on a risky mission to find them