@random

This Photo is by Jonas Bendiksen from his book Satellites: Photographs from the Fringes of the Former Soviet Union. The Fortean Times gives some background behind the shot:

The most strikingly otherworldly piece in Satellites captures two men stood atop a used rocket carcass in a field in the Altai Mountains smothered in butterflies. They live in the flight path of Baikonur Cosmodrome, in the Kazakh steppes, built by the USSR in the 1950s and now the largest operational launch facility in the world, popular among Western corporations as a cheap alternative to launching from the US. As the spent rocket stages fall flaming out of the sky, scrap metal dealers roar across the grasslands like Mad Max extras, racing to strip them of their titanium and high-grade aluminium. For many of the region’s former collective farmers, this space junk seems an answer to desperate prayers, yet it’s not all valuable metals; highly toxic rocket fuel seeps into the soil and water, and villagers complain of diseases and cancers; Bendikson finds dead cows in a lush, verdant field.