ALMATY, Kazakhstan (AP) -- Emergency workers carefully plucked six bodies from a heap of tangled metal Monday, following the collapse of a hangar roof at Russia's main space launch site. Officials said there was little hope of finding the last two missing workers alive.
Sunday's accident -- which sent construction workers plunging from a height of 260 feet (80 meters) at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan -- dealt a blow to Russia's space program, already suffering from severe funding shortages.
The accident could also revive tensions between Kazakhstan and Russia, which leases the launch site. Seven of the workers who fell were Kazakh citizens; the eighth was Belarusian.
Russia would not allow Kazakh rescuers to approach the towering building. A Russian rescue brigade of 64 people arrived at the site overnight and retrieved six bodies by midday Monday, said Viktor Beltsov, spokesman for the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry.
The hangar remained cordoned off Monday because of fears that the walls could collapse. Rescue workers had to pick through the debris by hand, since the structure was too delicate to use heavy equipment, Russia's ORT television reported.
Television footage of the disaster site showed jagged breaks along the hangar's upper walls and tangled metal hanging off the sides. The top panels of three of the outside walls crumpled along with the roof at the time of the accident. A Russian government commission was appointed to investigate the accident.
Russian space agency spokesman Sergei Gorbunov said it could have been prompted by something falling on one of the massive fuel tanks kept inside the hangar, which would have produced a huge blast of air that caused the roof to swell and collapse. Gorbunov insisted that the accident would not hinder Russian rocket development.
Kairzhan Turezhanov, a spokesman for the Kazakh Emergency Situations Committee, said one possible cause being investigated was a design miscalculation when the building, built in the 1960s, was renovated in the 1980s.
Space officials ruled out terrorism or poor building maintenance as causes of the accident.
The enormous building stands in the middle of the sprawling cosmodrome, a collection of Soviet-era concrete structures scattered across the steppe and connected by potholed roads.
The hangar was originally built for the Soviet moon exploration program and was later used for assembling Energia booster rockets and the Buran, the Soviet copy of the U.S. space shuttle that only flew once in the late 1980s before the program was abandoned for lack of funds.
A full-scale test model of the Buran was trapped beneath debris after Sunday's collapse, Russian space agency spokesman Konstantin Kreidenko said.
Baikonur, built when Kazakhstan and Russia were part of the same country, has been a source of tension since the Soviet collapse. In recent years, launch accidents have caused chemicals and rocket parts to rain down on nearby Kazakh villages.
The cosmodrome was a major player in the space race, launching the world's first satellite in 1957 and the first space traveler, Yuri Gagarin, four years later.
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