Vice President of Engineering at Yes Company, Itzik Aliyik was in Kazakhstan and he reports on his experiences, as well as the aspect of Yes Company, the largest customer of the Amos 2 satellite
Landscape photo from Baikonur
VP of Engineering at Yes Company, Itzik Eliakim, spoke to us from Moscow, where he made a stopover on the way back to Israel. The purpose of the conversation was to know the effect of the successful launch on Yes. But we couldn't resist and asked him to tell a little of his experiences in Baikonur."
"The place is special, it is in the Baikonur area which was the launch center of the Soviet Union and from where many satellites were launched. There are settlements there that at the time were inhabited - a city with 100 thousand inhabitants that was reduced to 20 thousand because of all the changes. There are lots of abandoned buildings and there are edges - advanced missile technology together with neglect of buildings. All in all, the population received us with a beautiful hospitality and there was also an experience here on the eve of the Hanukkah holiday when we lit Hanukkah candles together with a fir tree environment together with French engineers. A special and even symbolic atmosphere - lighting the eighth Hanukkah candle."
The cold was around minus ten degrees, very cold here. The observation point was about a kilometer from the launcher and the intensity of the rocket's combustion is something that lit up the whole environment. This is already the almost 1,700th launch of this type of missile, but the addition of the frigate connecting the satellite and the three-stage missile - this was only the fifth launch. All in all it's an amazing sight.
Half an hour before launch there are balconies that wrap around the rocket to handle it, then they open to a 45 degree angle and the rocket stands on its own with support from below. During the ignition of the engines, the support of the rocket from below opens and releases and the rocket rises up. It's an amazing sight. The amount of light is enormous."
"It can be said that Amos 2 goes live thanks to Yes"
We understood from the words of Zvi Kopelman, head of the communications satellite administration at Mevt-Hell in the aerospace industry, that Yes is one of the main beneficiaries of the successful launch of Amos 2. Can you elaborate?
"Since the Amos 2 satellite has higher strengths than Amos 1, it will allow Yes to expand the satellite capacity, so that it can add a wide variety of channels, programs and interactive services; And in addition, to increase the availability of the system, because the power of the satellite is higher."
What it means?
"In terms of the availability of the artery and the survival of the systems, the higher the power, the better I can receive the broadcast with smaller antennas. Even if the antenna will not be directed well, still in Amos 2, because of the excess power, the system will not sense. These are the advantages we call advantages in the availability of the satellite artery. In addition, the very expansion of the satellite capacity makes it possible to introduce new services, and in fact they create an infrastructure and a possibility for future technologies such as HDTV broadcasts - very high resolution television. These are broadcasts that require a large bandwidth, and expanding the capacity makes it possible to upload such a service with Yes Plus, for example."
Are you the biggest customer of Amos 2?
"You can say that Amos 2 is airing a lot thanks to Yes. When we chose the technological solution, we changed it a lot on blue-white technology. Both our encryption technology is an Israeli technology (NDS) and our video compression technology (the Harmonic company), the billing and collection system and the customer service is from the Israeli company Converges, and the content management system is from the Filat Media company. All in all, Yes contributes to the advancement of technology and the creation of jobs in Israel, both patriotism and pride of blue and white, as well as excellent products. We didn't choose them because they were blue and white, but because they were excellent and good, but it is this closeness between the customer and the supplier that creates a better product for both the customer and the supplier. Everyone enjoys the sacrifice. The technological solution of Yes is based on excellent Israeli technologies, and they are the leading companies in this field in the world. An industry has been created that is an industry of leaders in this field."
Are there any other technological advantages to the new satellite?
"The Amos 2 satellite is generally a much more complex satellite than Amos 1, because it has higher intensities and beams that cover Europe, the East Coast of the United States and the Middle East well. Amos 2, apart from what I said, is also a backup satellite for Amos 1, with commands from the ground, and it will also be a continuation satellite once Amos 1 ends its life. Although malfunctions do not usually occur when the satellite is in orbit, it still provides survivability in terms of transmissions. In addition, their location in space, their proximity, still allows our customers to receive both satellites in the same dishes. The distance between them will range from six to 70 kilometers, but still for viewers on the ground, with Yes plates, they are in the same position in space because of the distance and the opening angle of the antennas."
Half of the State of Israel
At a ceremony held at Tel Aviv University on the occasion of the launch, Amitsur Rosenfeld, the technical director of the Amos 2 project, said in a telephone report from Baikonur, that this is a desert area, completely straight, the size of half the state of Israel. The weather was clear, but the ground was still full of snow. He noted that the area is full of basements where many missiles from the Cold War era are still stored.
ארכיון
lost in space
In the heart of the arid steppes of Kazakhstan, Baikonur is located * The city, which terrorized the Western world during the Cold War, is now used as an international missile launcher, and hosts - in addition to the Israeli satellite "Amos 2" - also American projects * The story of the rise and fall of the Soviet space city
Alon Goldstein Baikonur, Kazakhstan
"This is Proton, the biggest missile. Kazakh girls in the city center Photo: Alon Goldstein
You have nothing to look for in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. At least that's what the Russian authorities think. At the airport you will be greeted by soldiers with a frozen look, at the hotel there will always be an obnoxious and unfriendly FBI agent (Russian security service). You won't make a wasteful shopping trip there, you won't visit a forgotten family member, you won't go on a tour around the city in a double-decker bus. The truth is, it's not certain that you even have anywhere to visit, since Baikonur doesn't exactly exist. In recent months, several dozen Israelis raided the city - engineers, economists, public relations personnel and journalists, all connected to the successful launch of the Israeli communications satellite "Amos 2", developed and produced by the aerospace industry following an order from the "Chall Communication" company. Israel does not yet have the ability to launch a satellite of this size (about 1,300 kilograms) to a huge height (36,000 kilometers), therefore "Amos 2" was "put on" a Russian rocket and launched into space from the historic site in Kazakhstan.
Baikonur is a city under siege. Three formidable enemies close it: man, nature and time. Man surrounded it with fences and walls, placed armed guards around it and polluted the air and the ground with poisonous gases and radioactive substances. Nature surrounds the city in vast and empty spaces, wherever you turn you will encounter nothing but dry bushes and an endless plain, snowy in winter and cracked by heat in summer. And time - like the winter air, time also froze in Baikonur: on the one hand, rockets carrying the best of human technology are launched into space from sites near the city. On the other hand, the huge hangars, once the glory of Soviet creation, are succumbing to rust, letting the wind crumble them into dust.
In fact, in Kazakhstan there are two cities named Baikonur. One, the older one, is not far from the Russia-Kazakhstan border. There is no famous enterprise in it, not even a successful football team, it is doubtful if you have heard of it at all. Baikonur II, on the other hand, is much more famous. This is Baikonur that terrorized the Western world during the Cold War, Baikonur that only received its official name in the mid-nineties, having until then been called Leninsk.
The new Baikonur is about 300 kilometers from the original Baikonur, in the middle of the Kazakhstan steppe, one drop of man-made in the middle of a sea of vast emptiness. About 60 thousand residents live there, 60 percent of them Kazakhs, the rest Russians. Once upon a time, in the early eighties, before the great collapse, the situation was different: 100 thousand people inhabited Baikonur, most of them Russians and a minority Kazakhs. Baikonur came out of nowhere, literally. It grew near a Kazakh village called Tiratam, in an area that for hundreds and thousands of years was inhabited only by camels, a few houses and a few foxes. But then the Soviets arrived and within a few years they built housing, built power plants, put up fences and above all - assembled missiles, launched people into space, conducted experiments with nuclear warheads and dug hundreds of "silhouettes" - those deep pits that were used to hide nuclear missiles, ready to be launched towards countries - United States.
Sleeping City
Baikonur was established in 1955 and its purpose was one: to serve as a sleeping town for the workers of the Cosmodrome - the center for the assembly of Soviet missiles and their decommissioning. The area where the communist government chose to build the launch site and the city was not chosen by chance. It's 10,000 square kilometers of sparsely populated arid plain, not exactly the kind of place a curious tourist would stumble upon. As soon as they arrived, the Russians began to build at an accelerated pace, and in less than two years there were residences, a cinema, a school, a park, factories for the production of hydrogen and oxidants, an airport and a hangar for storing and assembling missiles. The Russians even prepared a beach on the banks of the nearby Syr-Dara River, a place of refuge in the hot summer months. The Russian space program moved forward, the missiles kept getting bigger and better, and with them the number of launches scattered in the area.
In 1957, the Soviet Union stunned the world, and shocked America, when it successfully launched the first satellite - Sputnik - a metal ball studded with antennas that contained a simple radio transmitter. Then, on April 12, 1961, Baikonur opened a new era in human history: Major Yuri Gagarin was seated inside a metal capsule at the end of a large rocket named "Soyuz" and after three orbits around the Earth, Gagarin returned to the ground and was recognized as the first person to visit space.
When John Kennedy promised to bring an American man to the moon by the end of the decade, and the inter-power "space race" entered high gear, the city entered accelerated development. Russian engineers were transferred to Baikonur with their families and many Kazakhs also flowed there, who mainly worked in providing services to the more professional personnel employed at the cosmodrome. In the mid-nineties, there were already more than 350 residential buildings, nine schools, 31 kindergartens and 18 hotels in the city, which were not intended to accommodate tourists and the curious but government and military personnel and their guests.
But every freeway has an end, and suddenly development in the city stopped and the ravages of time began to take their toll. With the landing of the first man on the moon in July 1969, the Soviets abandoned the space programs and focused more on the nuclear programs. Less and less resources were allocated to the city and the cosmodrome. Many infrastructure development plans remained in the drawer, and Baikonur became what is called in Russia "a city under constant construction work".
A glorious past
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early nineties, the city's situation deteriorated even more, as the number of launches at the site decreased from 60 during the peak period, to a few single launches per year. Many workers were fired and left the place, entire blocks were abandoned, the road, electricity and water infrastructures were damaged and entire parts of the city still look like ghost neighborhoods today. The contrast between the glorious past and the crumbling present screams at every corner. Near the Cosmonauts Hotel, where Gagarin also stayed at the time, a model of a "Soyuz" rocket, almost 40 meters long, stands in the center of the street. A few meters from the missile is hidden a small and shabby grocery store. Cans on the shelves. Some dried fish in the fridge. On the table is a small and old TV that broadcasts in black and white, the kind you can find at a flea market. And that's barely. A local drunk hangs around outside. He says you can buy a bottle of vodka at the grocery store for 25 rubles, less than a dollar. "Vodka is important for health", he says, "there is a lot of poison in the air here because of the rocket fuel, and vodka is a good medicine".
In the local market, the only attraction besides the launching sites, Kazakhs with slanted eyes sell vegetables, fruits, Christmas decorations, spices, meat, and also fat against the cold. The Russians who work in the market are mainly concentrated in the area of furs, which have a relatively high price. As in the cosmodrome, the market also has stands. At the entrance to the market there is a small table with jars on it, Yagvani Sysoyev from Kyrgyzstan sells honey produced in Siberia. Until a few years ago, Sysoev worked as an electrical engineer at the cosmodrome, but today there is less work. "It's fine", he says, "today is better. There is more money, life is better."
Cold winter, hot summer
But still, life in the city is not simple. In winter, the temperature reaches a minimum of 35 degrees below zero and the heavy snows block the few roads and the many railroads. In the summer, the heat can climb to more than 35 degrees and the sandstorms penetrate everywhere: houses, cars and eyes. In a radius of tens and hundreds of kilometers, everything is deserted. No cities, no sea, no mountains. Only railroads cross the prairie. "In these districts, every distance is measured by its relation to the railroad, like from the Greenwich Line," wrote the writer and diplomat Chingis Aitametov in his book "And today we are not a bride". The city of Baikonur looks like one big factory. The power plant stands in the center, the big chimney emits thick smoke, and a tangle of thick and thin pipes branch out in the alleys, parallel to the roads, between the houses. Cold and hot water flows through the pipes to the residents. The pipes were installed above ground, locals explain, because of the high salinity in the soil, which causes corrosion and frequent interruptions in the water supply.
In 1995, four years after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Russian government leased the Baikonur region from the Kazakhstan government for 115 million dollars a year - in goods and raw materials. The Russians appointed a Russian mayor and established a joint militia for them and the Kazakhs to uphold the law. Since then, the situation of the city and its residents has improved slightly, mainly thanks to the privatization of launches, as the Baikonur Cosmodrome currently provides launch services to many countries in the world. Got a satellite, but no launch capability? The "Starsem" company - a joint commercial company of the Russian and European Space Agency - will provide you with a Russian rocket of any model you choose (depending on the weight of the satellite) and will take care of putting the satellite into orbit. And the price? Launching a medium-weight satellite mounted on the most reliable and popular rocket, the "Soyuz", will cost around 40 million dollars. The Americans, by the way, have also been doing all their launches from Baikonur since the crash of the space shuttle "Columbia".
Cosmic salad
Everything here revolves around the cosmodrome. Without it, the city has no right to exist. On the central boulevard in the city are scattered posters of giant missiles launched at El Al, four eight-year-old girls are standing under one of the posters. We ask one of them if she recognizes the missile. "It's Proton, the biggest rocket," she answers, adding that her father is a "big manager" at the cosmodrome. We ask them what they want to do when they grow up, will they work at the launch site? "No", they immediately reply, "we want to be a super model". At night, the locals go out to hang out at a small disco named, of course, "Luna". Russian pop songs mix here with American hip-hop and Indian music. Russian young women dressed in minis and pantyhose dance alongside Kazakh young women in elegant suits and young men in tank tops. Cosmic salad. Smoking is allowed, but not on the dance floor. If you are still caught dancing and smoking, you will receive a warning from the bully guard. After the third warning you will have to pay him a fine of 200 rubles in cash. No wisdom, no receipts.
Baikonur's future is uncertain. The "Starsem" company plans to transfer part of the Soyuz rocket launch activity to the Kourou site in French Guinea, a move that may further reduce the jobs in Baikonur. In that case, more and more people will abandon the city and the site, and more and more buildings that were once the splendor of the space industry will succumb to the siege that time has imposed on the city.
"It's sad, what's happening here," says Amitsur Rosenfeld, 60 years old, VP of "Hell Communication" for satellite programs, who came here for the "Amos 2" launch. ” This place was once the heart of the space industry of the Soviet Union, but today everything is crumbling, nothing is maintained. About a year and a half ago, eight workers worked here in a huge hangar, 60 meters high. They were working on a large Buran-type space shuttle. Suddenly the old hangar collapsed and buried them and the shuttle under the rubble. Rumor has it that the government didn't even bother investing the money to get the bodies out of there." If this story is true, the bodies are still buried in that hangar, serving as part of a rusted monument to a power that was and is no more.
