The stage of the "Soyuz" rocket, 2000, Altai

Children play on the wreckage of the Soyuz rocket stage, 2000. Photo: Jonas Bendix. White fluff is a butterfly.

Four regions (fields) of the fall of the second stages of carrier rockets launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome are officially located in the Altai. When the stage falls, they break into the dense layers of the atmosphere at a tremendous rate and are partially destroyed. Unspent fuel is mostly sprayed in the atmosphere along the trajectory of fall from 80-100 km to the ground, is carried by the wind and settles over a large area, a smaller part of the fuel remains in the debris, when it strikes the ground spilling "pointwise". Some fall areas have been used since the mid-1960s for the landing of the second stages of the Union and its modifications (on hydrocarbon fuels), some since the early 1970s for the landing of fragments of the second stages of the Proton (on hydrazine fuel).

In Soviet times, the environmental consequences of these falls were preferred to be hushed up. The first publication on this topic appeared in 1994 in the newspaper "Zvezda Altai". It cited the scientists' data that a total of 618 rocket stages were dropped at Ulagan district, each of which had up to 800 kg of highly toxic rocket fuel heptyl. The reaction of the authorities to the country of the winning publicity was unique: this issue of the newspaper disappeared not only from all libraries, but even the copy in the editorial office itself was seized.
In fact, residents of some regions of Altai live in constant expectation that something will fall on their head or spill something cosmic. The real hostages of scientific and technological progress. The area of ​​dispersal of missile fragments is considerable, and the coordinates of the fall are unpredictable. They fall on fields, hayfields, pastures, in reservoirs, near working machinery and people engaged in agricultural work, picking berries, weeding vegetable gardens. Since 1997, the fragments are constantly falling and on populated areas, closing the power lines. In some areas of Altai, people are simply afraid to go into the forest.