> This Girl Snuck Into a Russian Military Rocket Factory
It is neither military nor is it a factory. It is a rocket engine test facility. Interesting stuff nonetheless. Looks like a great source of grunge textures :)
this is a testing ground for rocket engines. It's not abandoned, but simply the photos were made at night when nobody is around. They perform engine tests quite regularly there.
the girl is lucky that she didn't get poisoned.
the nasty thing is that it's in the middle of a populated area.
I was thinking the same thing (vis-a-vis the hoax) like the girl who rode through Chernobyl on her motorcycle which turned out to be a hoax.
Then I thought about places where thieves are stealing cable to the street lights to resell as scrap copper and it makes me wonder if this place would be picked apart like that.
You will not be able to drive to Chernobyl by yourself. The only way to visit the restricted zone (~30km out from the plant) is by going with a tour company. Which is why the motorcycle thing is either a hoax or she is "highly connected".
I love photos of crazy, giant machinery. It's easy to forget that mankind builds things that are way, way larger than human scale that you just don't see in your comfortable city life.
Today I learned that Moscow has a giant exhaust pipe sticking out of it that discharges combusted rocket fuel mixture ... which is then combined with water vapor, turned into a giant toxic fume cloud, and spread through-out the city.
I would love to know the reason for its placement there.
From the website of the company that runs the facility (http://www.npoenergomash.ru/eng/) it would seem most of the tests are of engines which use a liquid oxygen/kerosene mixture - presumably not much more toxic than exhaust from cars..
I love the images and it's a great story. But I'm cautious because of the "Russian Motorcycling girl sneaks into Chernobyl and takes photos" thing, which was part fake / hoax.
I immediately thought of that story too! I still think it was an interesting read even after knowing it was part hoax!
Here's the link for those (few?) who haven't read it yet: http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chapter1.html
'Chernobyl tour guide Yuri Tatarchuk claimed that Filatova "booked a tour, wore a leather biker jacket and posed for pictures.' LOL
Yeah, there are legal trips to Czarnobyl and lots of photos from the place (although you can't enter with vehicles), that's why I was curious what is the hoax about.
To be fair, this is a lot harder to 'fake' - and even if it's not a missile factory specifically, it's clearly a dilapidated factory of some sort and she got some fantastic photos of it.
I'd love to see a translation of this. There's a few shots with her in them that seem like they'd be tough to do with a tripod & timer (though to be fair I am no photographer) so I'm curious who, if anyone, she went in there with and what brought them there in the first place.
If this were an active military facility there would have been a portrait of Vladimir Putin hanging in every room. But obviously this factory has long been abandoned.
she states that the russian administrative code lets you visit the site if it is not surrounded by a fence (which had beed partially ruined before by someone).
i am not sure that that will help her against the prosecution, she must have revealed some secrets of a rocket engine factory.
check the wikileaks case, the guy published the information he didn't steal himself, he had the right to do so but it didn't help much.
Not really. Of course meeting a guard would be a pretty stressful experience, but it's not like Russia is filled with slave camps. Unless you're a vocal activist, you should be ok ;)
From the site faq: What to Submit...
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
It is neither military nor is it a factory. It is a rocket engine test facility. Interesting stuff nonetheless. Looks like a great source of grunge textures :)