The world’s first — and most secret — space base, the Baikonur Cosmodrome, sits in the middle of a vast desert in central Asia, 2,600 km southeast of Moscow and 1,300 km from Kazakhstan’s two main cities, Nur-Sultan (the capital) and Almaty.
It was from this remote steppe location that, in 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched the world’s first artificial satellite —Sputnik 1— into Earth orbit.
It was also from there that, four years later, in 1961, the rocket was launched that took Yuri Gagarin to become the first human being to fly in space, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1. And, in 1963, Valentina Tereshkova left Baikonur as the first woman in space.
Since the end of NASA’s space shuttle program, the US space agency, in 2011, Baikonur has become the only functioning rocket launch site on the planet for the International Space Station (ISS).
Now, 60 years after Gagarin’s first historic flight, Baikonur is the world’s premier rocket launching base.
But how and why did a dusty outpost in the western reaches of Kazakhstan become humanity’s unlikely gateway to outer space?
To get to space, you need two things: to be far from populated areas and to be as close as possible to the equator, to take advantage of the Earth’s rotation speed, which is higher in that region of the planet.
In the case of the American space program, the answer was the east coast of Florida, where the Kennedy Space Center was built.
The Soviet Union, on the other hand, had been until the so-called Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan in search of a remote location within its borders where it could carry out long-range missile tests and rocket launches.
The Soviet Union had been conducting rocket tests since the 1920s. After World War II, it acquired German V-2 rocket technology, which significantly boosted its space program.
The Soviets identified a huge expanse of wasteland in the southern steppe of Kazakhstan, along the Sir Darya River, in a small settlement called Tyuratam (or Toretam).
There was already a railroad terminal there—a basic platform for cargo and passengers—built for geologists and researchers who were originally looking for oil, but not much more than that.
It was a flat, treeless desert with extreme weather conditions. Sandstorms were frequent; temperatures reached over 50°C in summer and ice storms blew winds below -30°C in winter.
Using the train line, the Soviet machine went to work, bringing thousands of workers to build and assemble facilities and a set of launch pads, including the largest artificial crater on the planet: a ditch 250 m long, 100 m wide and 45 m deep, designed to receive the massive amount of flames and smoke that the world’s largest rocket spews out during its launch.
The city of Tyuratam grew along the river, about 30 km south of the launch facilities. To outwit their American competitors, the Soviets changed the name of Tyuratam, taking the name from another city a few hundred kilometers away to rename the cosmodrome and local town.
Thus was born the secret of Baikonur.
Interestingly, it seems fitting that this desolate and distant area is the last place astronauts stay before leaving Earth and the first place they see when they return home.
In the documentary about his record time aboard the ISS, “A Year in Space,” NASA astronaut Scott Kelly described Baikonur as a sort of home halfway to space. : “In some ways, it makes a little sense for me to get to a place like this first, already isolated from what’s normal for you. It feels more like a jumping off point to another place even more isolated. [chegar a] another more remote location.”
No seu livro “Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space” (“Beyond: The Surprising Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Travel to Space,” in free translation), Stephen Walker wrote that space control was an ideological mission and a military issue.
Rockets were first developed to fly into space, but governments quickly realized their potential for carrying ballistic missiles that could drop bombs over distant enemy territories. Earth-orbiting satellites could also provide an astronomical view of distant lands that human spies would have trouble visiting.
While, in the early 1960s, the United States was trying to keep up appearances about its — known to be stagnant — attempts to take someone into space, Soviet secrecy benefited the USSR’s space program.
After all, if a tragedy occurred during a North American release, TV would show it live, in front of the press and the country.
As for the Soviets, secrecy offered the freedom to take greater risks and move forward with more speed and a sense of urgency.
“The Soviets were protecting their missile launch site and their technology. The R7 missile, which carried Gagarin, was the largest intercontinental ballistic missile in the world at the time. And its secrets needed to be protected. for Americans to get this technology — which, in fact, they eventually did,” Walker told the BBC.
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.
In 1994, the Russians signed an agreement with Kazakhstan to rent Baikonur at an annual cost of about 7 billion rubles (about R$627 million).
More and more tourists visit Baikonur to watch launches, especially manned missions for the ISS, but the sense of secrecy remains today.
The city is essentially a Russian enclave surrounded by Kazakhstan and the cosmodrome is a restricted facility operated by the Russian space agency, Roscosmos.
Travelers must be on a guided tour organized by a certified operator to apply for a series of entry permits.
Elena Matveeva, project manager at Vegitel —one of the main tourism operators in Baikonur— says that the sense of secrecy is part of the cosmodrome’s attractions.
“It offers the opportunity to visit a unique place that you cannot visit alone. You can only come [com] an authorized tour operator who can [solicitar] access release.”
Baikonur comprises the cosmodrome — a massive 7,000 square kilometer piece of land with a complex of hangars and launch pads — and the city (formerly called Tyuratam) to the south.
The city of Baikonur, in many ways, is a perfect relic of the 1960s Soviet Union.
Stoic mosaics showing brawny comrades heralding the new space age still decorate the entrance gates and walls of the functional raw concrete apartment blocks where construction workers, aerospace engineers and their families have lived.
Inside the cosmodrome, crumbling hangars adjoin the original minimalist cottages, where early cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin spent the last night before traveling into space.
Most tourists visit Baikonur specifically to witness the launch of rockets. But Gianluca Pardelli, founder and director of Soviet Tours — a travel agency specializing in travel to the former Soviet Union — says Baikonur is also interesting for its cultural and historical attractions.
“The namesake city next to the cosmodrome is a perfect example of Soviet urban planning in the middle of nowhere – it’s a planned Soviet city in the middle of the steppe and desert of Kazakhstan,” he says.
A typical Baikonur tour encompasses visits to launch facilities, including the Gagarin Platform, from which Yuri first made his way into space.
The Baikonur Cosmodrome Historical Museum tells the story of the launch pad: “It houses objects that you won’t find anywhere else, in any other space museum in the world,” says Stephen Walker. “It is filled with strange artifacts, small objects, parts and parts, all to celebrate the glory days of the Soviet space program.”
Getting there is an adventure in itself. It takes a flight to one of Kazakhstan’s main cities —Astana or Almaty— followed by a domestic flight to the city of Kyzylorda and a four-hour drive by car or train (slow) west through the open countryside to Baikonur .
Once there, you can choose between an international hotel, which also accommodates astronauts, or a cheaper, no-frills, Soviet-style hotel.
Tourists attending the lunch party participate in festivities, including transporting the Russian Soyuz rocket in a special rail car from the hangar to the launch pad and a farewell ceremony for the astronauts (or cosmonauts, as they are called in Russia) as they board a bus to go to the spacecraft.
For Robert Joy, a tourist from Swansea, Wales, who visited Baikonur in 2019, seeing the rocket transport was the highlight of the visit.
“You stand by the rocket and accompany it to Launch Pad #1. It’s a complete satisfaction.”
Joy claims that traveling to Baikonur was her lifelong dream. “I had always wanted to visit Baikonur since I was a child. It was the secret Soviet launch site behind the Iron Curtain.”
For Elena Matveeva, the experience of witnessing a launch causes great emotion.
“It’s a combination of a spectacular event and history being lived out. Because when you see the rocket being launched, you feel the earth trembling and you hear the roar of the engines… you are participating in this historic event. you feel like someone close to the cosmonauts who are going to space.”
In November 2020, the US company SpaceX, owned by Elon Musk, launched its first Crew Dragon mission, sending a crew to the ISS from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida (USA). It was the first launch of a manned mission in the United States since the space shuttle Discovery in 2010.
Russia is also building its own rocket launching base, the Vostochny Cosmodrome, in the far east of the country.
But Russia is optimistic about continuing operations in Baikonur. In an exclusive statement to the BBC, Roscosmos stated that the new Vostochny Cosmodrome will not bring about a reduction in activities in Baikonur.
“Russia, in cooperation with [a] Republic of Kazakhstan is creating the new space complex at Baiterek in Baikonur. Another important project is the modernization of the famous Gagarin Platform to operate the modern Soyuz 2 launch vehicle.”
Whatever its future as a rocket launcher, Baikonur’s importance as a living piece of history, Soviet nostalgia and human cultural heritage is unquestionable.
London, Paris, Beijing and Washington may be centers of past or present empires, but it was from a dusty train station in the middle of the Kazakhstan steppe that humanity made its first foray into the cosmos.
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