> 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.

UPD: here's the illustration of an actual engine test http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/2/33213654.df/0_71e83_5dfd0bf...

Translation into english: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&...

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.

I think I saw that Chernobyl one, how that turned out to be a hoax?

I was planning driving with friends there one summer, and whole idea of this trip was inspired by those photos.

The "Chernobyl biker" was/is Elena Filatova a.k.a. "KiddOfSpeed":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Filatova

I believe this thread is where the hoax was first exposed:

http://www.uer.ca/forum_showthread_archive.asp?threadid=8951

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".

She claimed to be highly connected claimed her father was a well known physicist or biologist working there.

Do you happen to know how much tour company bills for such trip?

$600: http://rt.com/news/prime-time/chernobyl-tourist-destination-... (Legal fallout bans Chernobyl zone tourism)(2011-NOV-25)

I really hope they re-open the grounds. That's one of those reminders that needs to stay fresh in the memory of humanity.

This looks familiar because it looks like a lot of video game levels.

For sure! I just just wondering if I could sneak in there w/ a bunch of my friends and play the world's most intense paintball game!

I immediately thought of Half-Life 2.

Specifically, STALKER. That's all I could think about when looking at those images. They look nearly identical.

Black Ops has pretty much that entire thing perfectly reproduced.

On that note, some music to listen to while looking through those photos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jj0F2KfCvhg

I happened to have this on while opening the link and it fitted perfectly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UXrCq384hE

More fitting for the situation... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRRTOnXOZsM

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..

TIL == Today I learned? (Edit) I must be older than I thought. I take from the downvoting this is a well-known acronym I should know.

It's a redditism

it was built outside of the city several decades ago. But later the city has grown

I hear a 'In Soviet Russia joke coming on...

For a second, I thought I spotted a Dalek in there. http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/5/33213654.df/0_71e64_c0b3a07...

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

I remember the site, but what was the hoax part exactly?

She got in with the official guide and then reported it and published photos as if she rode her bike there by herself.

People go there completely legally for sightseeing for many years now for a small fee.

oh, right http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Filatova

'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.

It's probably real. People do this stuff all the time.

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=67536

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=67492

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=40287

There's hundreds of other examples on that site.

For sure, but there's a big difference between "factory" and "military factory".

The last one of those links is a bomb factory.

It seems she is an expert in this type of exploration- her whole blog is devoted to it, here's her entry of military finds- http://lana-sator.livejournal.com/tag/military

This is not a hoax. It was on Russian national news network at about the same time when one of their satellites came down.

If these pics are real (and not a hoax), this is amazing!

Well, even if it's a hoax, this is amazing!

Im surprised she shows her face though...

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.

Reminded me of this, a WWII/Cold War missile test site in San Diego:

http://www.sandiegoreader.com/news/2008/apr/02/--/

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.

Reminds me of the Sleepy City (http://sleepycity.net/) folks.

wow - just a reminder of the vast machinery required to produce rockets with chemical based propellants

And in this type of collapsing facility they test the engines that never reach the orbit.

Alyx, is that you?

Even if it's abandoned, isn't she going to wind up in the Russian version of gitmo? (Siberia?)

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 ;)

Sorry, but what is the relevance of this to Hacker News? Please don't let this turn into Reddit.

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.

Go back to Reddit, you clearly belong there. :)