Russia Has Taken Back a Former Soviet Deep Space Tracking Station

The ongoing conflict in Crimea has already taken a toll on space exploration. Last week, NASA announced that it is effectively severing its working relationship with Russia on all space activities except getting astronauts up to the International Space Station; the American agency will continue buying its astronauts seats aboard Soyuz for the time being. But there are other space sites affected by the situation in Ukraine, like the deep space tracking station located in Crimea. Almost as old as the space age itself, the facility was recently taken over by Russia.

Right on the southern tip of southern Crimea between the Koshka mountains and the Black Sea is a town called Semiiz. The climate is temperate and there’s very little natural radio interference. When the space age began, Soviet scientists quickly identified Semiiz as an ideal site for a deep space tracking station. In 1958, the first pieces of a temporary site, called KIP-41E, were built.

The site of Koshka was a modest one consisting of mobile trailers, wooden structures, and tents; there were plans for a more permanent site near the city of Yevpatoria, also in the Crimean peninsula. Regardless of its transient nature, the site at Koshka opened for business Sept. 27, 1958 and was well-equipped with a radio station designed to communicate with spacecraft flying beyond the Moon.

It wasn’t long before the site at Koshka was helping make history. In October of 1959, the site gave Luna 3 the commands that enabled its imaging system to take the first ever photographs of the Moon’s far side.

Before the end of the year, the Soviet government approved construction of the Center for Deep Space Communications (abbreviated TsDKS). The new center would be part of the ground control network spanning the Soviet Union. It was to be built near the city of Yevpatoria and became known as NIP-16, designed to host the Pluton communications complex. The site was constructed in just eight months by the Soviet Navy.

Shifts at the new center ran around the clock and there were no days off. With building materials in short supply, there was a lot of creativity involved in the construction effort. Hulls from decommissioned submarines were repurposed and attached to old railway bridges to make new antennas. A mechanism for rotating the dish was fashioned from an unused cannon.

The final site at NIP-16 had two stations about seven miles apart, a receiving station near the village of Vitino and a transmitting station near the village of Uyutnoe, both run by officers of the Soviet Army.

The Pluton complex’s first mission was Venera 1, a Venus-bound probe that launched Feb. 12, 1961. The mission failed—the probe went silent on its way to Venus—but the Crimean station performed as designed.

The site went on to play critical roles in all of the Soviet Union’s early lunar and planetary missions that flew in the later 1960s and 1970s, including the Venera, Mars, and Luna missions. It was also gradually built up with more hardware and communications systems. In 1963, the Saturn-MS facility was added to the Crimean center in support of the unrealized Soviet lunar landing project. That facility was eventually used to support other missions, including Soyuz flights and missions aboard the Salyut and Mir space stations. Construction of two radio telescopes for the next addition, the Kvant-D facility, started in 1973. This new hardware eventually increased the capability of the NIP-16 ground station’s wavelength and sensitivity range for increased data-rate capacity. A telemetry processing center also joined the site in 1973.

Though it played a crucial role in a number of the Soviet Union’s early missions, the Crimean site was abandoned when the Soviet Union fell and the Ukrainian authorities took over. Eventually, it was run by the Ukrainian National Center of Space Means (abbreviated NTsUIKS), which was meant to support the 2011 Russian Phobos-Grunt mission, the Mars-bound probe that never made it beyond Earth orbit.

Within the last two years, Russia’s long-term plans in space called for a new southern communications site to be built on Russian soil. But in the mean time it looks like Russia has taken back the former Soviet station in Crimea. Since Russia moved into Crimea, 210 out of 235 people working at the Yevpatoria ground station have agreed to work for Russian authorities. It is now controlled by the Russian Ministry of Defense, the same government branch that controlled ground communications in the former Soviet Union’s network.