On many roads that connected almost 2 000 objects scattered all over the launch site, there was round-the-clock movement of cars and buses of all types and sizes, construction and military equipment… A car going past you made you feel that you are not alone, but when it drove away, loneliness surrounded you from all sides again.
The atmosphere of the launch site was absolutely unique and incommunicable. It can probably happen only on our numerous earthly cosmodromes. Each rocket and its multiple parts, components, devices, systems, materials were the results of work of hundreds of design offices and scientific and research institutes, thousands of enterprises and hundreds of thousands of people scattered all over the huge country.
And all that was delivered, brought and concentrated on the launch site. The launch site gave a final touch to all that, checked and tried it many times in accordance with numerous technologies and rules, until the final and probably the most important stage came – rocket launch, for which the Launch site was created.
But the launch site – it’s not only hundreds of thousands of tons of concrete, steel, integration buildings, launch grounds and a long list of parts that make it up: these are just instruments. The main thing is people working there, so the launch site is really alive…
Considering the schedule of launches which was the most intense on Earth, the working environment in the many-thousand team of the launch site was quite tense… It probably reflected on the northern nature surrounding it, and it produced the atmosphere which was nothing like any other cosmodrome on Earth.
While they are flying, the launch site could have launched a good hundred of rockets with satellites and research craft to the Moon, Venus or Mars. Some rockets are still in the integration house, some are already on launch grounds, some are being delivered, and some are being assembled on plants. But sooner or later they will meet in the place from which they started – on the launch site.
The word “cosmodrome” was not very widely used then, rocket engineers had their own terms and designations, and other military units had theirs. But most of them called it all simply a launch site.
Probably some part of him, Andrey, as well as the whole crew, remained there, and they took some part of the atmosphere with them…