Baikonur Cosmodrome

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The Baikonur Cosmodrome (Kazakh: Байқоңыр ғарыш айлағы, Bayqoñır ğarış aylağı; Russian: Космодром Байконур, Kosmodrom Baykonur), also called Tyuratam, is the world's oldest and largest operational space launch facility. Although located in Kazakhstan, it was originally built by the Soviets. It is situated about 200 km east of the Aral Sea, on the north bank of the Syr Darya, near the town of Tyuratam and in the south-central part of the country. Today this station is owned by Russian Federal Space Agency.

Image:Baikonur-cosmodrome-entrance.jpg

The name Baikonur was chosen to intentionally mislead the West as to the actual location of the site by suggesting that the site was near Baikonur, a mining town about 320 km northeast of the space centre in the desert area near Dzhezkazgan. The cosmodrome's geographic coordinates are Template:Coor d.

Baikonur was the base of operations for the Soviets' ambitious space program from the late 1950s through to the '80s and fully equipped with facilities for launching both manned and unmanned space vehicles. It supports many different generations of Russian spacecraft: Soyuz, Proton, Tsyklon, Dnepr and Zenit. Since the temporary lapse of the United States' Space Shuttle program it has played an essential role in the resupply and deployment of the International Space Station.

The site was founded on June 2, 1955. It was originally built as a long-range-missile centre and later expanded to include space-flight facilities. A supporting town was built around the facility to provide apartments, schools and support for workers. It was raised to city status in 1966 and named Leninsk, but later renamed Baikonur in 1995.

Many historic flights have lifted off from Baikonur: the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, on October 4, 1957, the first manned orbital flight by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, and the flight of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and launching the first Brazilian astronaut, Marcos Pontes into space, on March 29, 2006. The launch pad built for these early flights, at 45.9200 N, 63.3423 E, continued to be used for all Soviet and Russian manned launches through 2005. Baikonur is also the site of the Nedelin catastrophe in 1960, in which a prototype ICBM exploded before launch, killing over 100.

The space program continued operating from Baikonur even after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, under the auspices of the Commonwealth of Independent States. On June 8 2005 the Russian Federation Council ratified an agreement between Russia and Kazakhstan on the future use of the Baikonur spaceport. This agreement extends Russia’s rent term of the spaceport Baikonur until 2050. The rent costs 115 million US dollars per year.

Due to the long-running dispute between Russia and Kazakhstan over the yearly rent for the cosmodrome, Russia began upgrading its own Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk Oblast of Northern Russia.

Kazakhstan is prepared to spend 200 Million US Dollars to build its own rocket called “Bayterek” (poplar-tree). The Bayterek rocket will be designed and built in the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Kazakhstan is redesigning its own space program and studying the possibility of participating in international space projects with its new design. The design phase of the Bayterek rocket will take about five years to complete. It is expected that the Bayterek rocket will be of similar design to the Russian “Angara” rocket. The new rocket design requires modification of the Baikonur launch facility. This will allow for the use of the new environmentally safe Heavy Lift Launch Vehicle / (HLLV) rocket to increase the weight of satellites launched from the cosmodrome.

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