![]() The mystery of Central Asia's desert kites.Inside the cosmodrome, crumbling hangars stand side-by-side next to the original, minimalist cottages where Yuri Gagarin and the early cosmonauts slept the night before they went into space. Stoic mosaics depicting muscular comrades heralding a new era of space still decorate entrance gates and the walls of the town's functional, Brutalist apartment blocks, which once housed construction workers, aerospace engineers and space families. The town of Baikonur is in many ways a perfect relic of the Soviet 1960s. You have to come an authorised tour operator who can access clearance."īaikonur comprises both the cosmodrome – a vast, 7000-sq-km tract of land with a complex of launchpads and hangars – and the town (formerly Tyuratam), which lies to the south. "It gives you an opportunity to visit a unique place you cannot visit by yourself. Travellers must be on a guided tour arranged through an operator that is certified to apply for a pile of entry permits.Įlena Matveeva, project manager for Vegitel, one of the main tour operators to Baikonur, said this is part of the cosmodrome's draw. ![]() The town is essentially a Russian exclave surrounded by Kazakhstan, and the cosmodrome is a restricted facility operated by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency. In 1994, the Russians signed an agreement with Kazakhstan to lease Baikonur at an expense of approximately 7 billion rubles (£82.5 million) a year.Ī growing number of tourists now visit Baikonur to watch launches, especially crewed missions to the ISS, but the sense of secrecy remains today. With the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Kazakhstan gained independence and suddenly Russia's most important space base was on foreign soil. People were terrified that the Americans would get hold of this technology, which in fact, they did, ultimately," Walker told me. "The Soviets were protecting their missile site, protecting their technology – the R7 missile, which Gagarin flew in, was the biggest intercontinental ballistic missile in the world at the time. For the Soviets, secrecy offered freedom to take bigger risks and to move faster and with more urgency. If tragedy were to strike during a US launch, it would happen on live TV, in front of the press and the nation. While in the early 1960s, the United States tried to save face on its publicly stalled attempts to get a person into space, Soviet secrecy benefitted the USSR's programme. Satellites orbiting Earth could also provide an astronomical view into foreign lands that human spies would have trouble reaching. Rockets were first developed to fly into space, but government minds quickly realised their potential to carry ballistic missiles that could drop bombs on faraway enemy territory. In his book, Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space, Stephen Walker wrote that control of space was both an ideological quest and a military matter. You know, one remote place to a more remote place." In the documentary about his record-breaking stay aboard the ISS, A Year in Space, Nasa astronaut Scott Kelly described Baikonur as a kind of halfway house to space: "In some ways, it makes a little bit of sense to me to come to a place like this first, that is already isolated from what is normal to you, because it seems more like it's a stepping stone to someplace that's further isolated. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, went to the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic in search of a remote locale within its borders that could accommodate long-range missile testing and rocket launches. In the case of the US space programme, this meant the east coast of Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center was built. To get to space, you need two things: to be far away from populated areas and to be as close to the equator as possible to take advantage of the Earth's rotational speed, which is fastest at that contour of the planet. Now, 60 years after Gagarin's historic first flight, it remains the world's main spaceport.īut how and why did a dusty outpost in the wilds of western Kazakhstan become humanity's unlikely gateway to outer space? And in 1963, Valentina Tereshkova launched from Baikonur as the first woman in space.Īfter the retirement of Nasa's Space Shuttle programme in 2011, Baikonur became the planet's only working launch site to the International Space Station (ISS). Four years later, in 1961, Yuri Gagarin launched from here to become the first human to fly into space aboard the Vostok 1. It was from this remote part of the western steppe in 1957 that the Soviet Union successfully launched the first artificial satellite – Sputnik 1 – into orbit around Earth. The world's first and most secretive space base, Baikonur Cosmodrome, sits in the middle of a vast Central Asian desert, 2,600km south-east of Moscow and 1,300km from Kazakhstan's two main cities, Nur-Sultan and Almaty.
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