Pitch Black Spaceship
Even if you’ve never visited Coober Pedy in
southern Australia, you probably have seen it via your movie or TV screen. The
inhospitable desert wasteland lies in the heart of OZ’s opal mining country and
the otherworldly setting has been featured as a film location for Mad Max
Beyond Thunderdome, Red Planet, and Pitch Black to name just a few. The latter
flick featured the above wrecked spaceship, bought about a dozen years ago by a
local shop owner after filming was completed.
Oklahoma Cement Mixer Space Capsule
Construction crews hard at work building a
bridge over Oologah Lake near Talala, Oklahoma in 1959 couldn’t believe their
eyes when the driver of a cement mixer loaded with liquid cement lost control
of the massive vehicle. As he swerved off Winganon Road, the truck overturned
and it wasn’t long before the cement inside began to harden. The truck was
salvaged, mostly… the now solid cement-filled bell was too heavy to shift and
has remained in place for over a half-century.
Buran Buran
In post-Soviet Russia, Earth crash on
spaceship! On May 12th of 2002 the hangar housing Buran, Russia’s only space
shuttle to be launched into orbit and land successfully back on Earth,
collapsed during a severe storm. Eight workers lost their lives in the accident
and the shuttle was destroyed. Not many know, however, that Buran was only the
first of FIVE Soviet shuttles completed or under construction when the program
was cancelled in 1993. The second shuttle was named Ptichka; the third was
named Baikal.
In October of 2004 Baikal, estimated to
30-50% completed, was moved from its hangar at the Tushino factory to an
open-air car-park where it spent the next 7 years protected only by flimsy
tarpaulins.
The curious image above dates from late
June of 2011, when the fuselage of Shuttle 2.01 Baikal was floated down the
Volga river by barge. Its ultimate destination was the MAKS 2011 international
air show, which took place from August 16th through 21st at Zhukovsky town near
Moscow. We don’t think that’s Russian president Vladimir Putin in the image
above, returning from a bathroom break to resume towing the barge downstream, but
we could be wrong (and we wouldn’t be surprised).
The Altai Spaceship Graveyard
Back back back to the former USSR we go,
specifically the relatively unpopulated Altai region of Kazakhstan downwind of
the Baikonur cosmodrome, where the former Soviet Union and now Russia launch
rockets into space. For decades, spent stages and entire failed spacecraft have
been raining down upon the Altai region. Most of the wrecks are scavenged by
natives of the region who see the metal fallen from the sky as a free and useful
unnatural resource.
Planet of the Apes ANSA Capsule
The first entry in the enormously
successful Planet of the Apes film franchise was shot on location in 1967 at
Malibu State Park in California, which makes the ruined Statue of Liberty
Taylor (Charlton Heston) stumbles across at the film’s end seem even more out
of place. The park was also home to the famous “Fox Ranch” where 20th Century
Fox stored used (and often reused) movie props including the dart-like ANSA
spacecraft “Icarus” that brought the human astro-, er, Ansanauts to the apes’
world.
Planet of the Apes’ CALIMA/OBERON
Thirty-three years after the original hit
the nation’s theaters, director Tim Burton’s reboot of Planet of the Apes was
released. While Mark Wahlberg is no Charlton Heston by any means, the crashed
space station Oberon (or “Calima”, as the apes refer to it) is indeed
impressive as it’s not a CGI creation but a realistically-sized prop.
Oberon/Calima was built at one of the
film’s locations amid the weird landscape of the Trona Pinnacles, not far from
the equally odd Fish Rocks in eastern California. While suitably imposing on
film, the futuristic decrepit downed space station looks less so in
pre-production surrounded by porta-potties and a pickup truck. Hey, when an
ape’s gotta go, an ape’s gotta go!
Shuttled Off This Mortal Coil
Rocketing into space has been described as
a roller coaster ride but one space shuttle has found that comparison to be a
bit too true. Built in 1988 by Carrington Engineering in Newcastle, Australia,
this full-size mockup space shuttle was constructed with the full permission of
NASA, who even provided access to some of the actual shuttle blueprints.
Final Destination Moon?
Holy Iron Sky, Batman, is that the remains
of a downed spacecraft or merely the lunar version of the much-ballyhooed Mars
Face? The answer depends partly on how open-minded one is; partly on how much
credence one puts in the power of pareidolia, the “seeing faces in clouds”
phenomenon. What the average observer might think they see is not a face, but
something resembling the forward fuselage of a Boeing 747.
Images sourced from NASA’s Clementine
moon-mapping mission in 1994 seem to show a long rectangular object lying
roughly perpendicular to the rim of the Lobachevskiy crater on the moon’s far
side – the dark side, as some call it. As the crater spans 84km (52 miles) from
rim to rim, whatever that “something” may be, it’s BIG. The anomaly also
displays interesting lengthwise striations and what appears to be a wide,
regular concavity along one side.
You’d think if NASA thought they’d found an
abandoned spaceship on the moon, they’d send a manned mission to check it out… and
so they did, in November of 1969! Astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean,
aboard Apollo 12, touched down on the lunar surface a mere 600 feet from the
robotic Surveyor 3 lander which at the time had been there for over 2.5 years.
The astronauts used a set of bolt cutters to remove several pieces of their
automated predecessor and returned them to Earth for study. Reportedly Surveyor
did not resist, because resistance is futile.
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