ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

1980 Plesetsk launch pad disaster

Okay kiddo, so in the year 1980, a very bad thing happened at a place called Plesetsk Launch Pad in Russia. You know how rockets are launched into the sky to go to outer space, right? Well, Plesetsk is a place where they launch rockets from.

So, on a day when some people were preparing to launch a rocket, something went horribly wrong. There was an explosion that caused a lot of damage and made a very big fire. This explosion was so big that it caused radioactive material to get spread around the area. This is not good because radioactive material can be very dangerous and can make people and animals sick.

Unfortunately, some people who were working at the Plesetsk Launch Pad got hurt and some of them even died because of the explosion and the spreading of radioactive material. This was a very sad and scary event.

After the disaster, the people who were in charge of the Plesetsk Launch Pad had to figure out what went wrong and how they could prevent something like this from ever happening again. They learned a lot of important lessons from the disaster and the safety procedures at the launch pad were improved to make sure that nobody else would get hurt.

Overall, the 1980 Plesetsk Launch Pad Disaster was a very bad thing that happened, but we can learn from it and use what we learned to make things safer for everyone.