Leaked report claims rockets spray killer chemical across nearby area, causing blood diseases. Andrew Osborn reports
It sealed its reputation in 1961 when Yuri Gagarin blasted off from its barren steppe to complete the first manned space flight in history, but Russia’s main cosmodrome has now been accused of a far less glorious achievement: poisoning local children.
According to an unpublished Russian scientific study, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan is responsible for an alarming increase in blood and hormonal disorders among children.
Scientists say that rockets launched from the site, one of the world’s busiest and most lucrative space bases, continue to spray highly toxic unspent fuel over several square miles. It contains a chemical called hydrazine which is used to thin rocket fuel and is regarded as poisonous in the extreme. So powerful is hydrazine that if one tablespoon of the substance were to be added to a swimming pool anyone who drank the water would be killed.
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It compared the health records of 1000 children in the area with 330 outside the rocket fuel fallout zone and found that the incidence of serious blood and endocrine disorders and diseases was twice as high in the vicinity of Baikonur. The incidence of other diseases was also found to be much higher.
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But the Russians aren’t the only ones who need to take the problem seriously, it argued. Nasa and the European Space Agency (ESA) both lease Baikonur from Rosavia kosmos, the Russian Space Agency, and the remote launch-site has become the main departure point for the International Space Station.
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Vyacheslav Davidenko, a spokesman for the Russian Space Agency, argues that the organisation’s own in-house studies have not revealed any such problems and that Moscow financially compensates communities under the rockets’ flight path anyway. He also contends that the higher rate of disease among the children could be a result of the fact that their standard of living is unusually low compared with other parts of Russia, and suggests it could also be a consequence of another Soviet-era legacy nearby: the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing facility.
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But Baikonur has a darker side too. For almost 40 years the Soviet authorities covered up a terrible accident that occurred there in 1960 during the testing of a new inter continental ballistic missile. The missile exploded on the ground killing almost 100 people including several senior space experts. The Kremlin said at the time that only one person – Marshall Mitrofan Nedelin – had died in “a plane crash”, but the full truth emerged in 1989.
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