A major accident occurred yesterday at one of the facilities at the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. At about 11.20 local time, three of the five floors of the installation and testing building at the 112th site suddenly collapsed. According to preliminary data, this happened just at the moment when a team of eight repairmen was working on the roof of the building, removing debris from the roof. The collapsed structures are huge - their height is 80-100 meters, and impassable rubble has formed on the site of the workshop. The local rescue services had not yet been able to find the workers who were on the roof among them, and nothing was known about the fate of the repairmen. It was assumed that they may be alive and under multi-ton rubble. Local emergency services immediately began searching for victims, and at the same time, an Emergency Situations Ministry plane with a group of rescuers and Rosaviakosmos specialists urgently took off from Moscow to Baikonur. It is still unclear what caused the accident; a special headquarters has been created at Rosaviakosmos to find out. During Soviet times, assembly, testing and preparation for flight of the domestic reusable space system “Energia” were carried out in this building.
