Rich and brown calm, soft or spacious space-run
Text by Alexandre Petrov

Translate the two Kazakh words 'bay' and 'konir' into English and you get 'rich' and 'brown', with alternatives for 'konir' including 'calm', 'soft' and 'spacious'; the Russian 'kosmodrom' gives you 'space-run' if you take the Greek roots literally. Of course most people understand kosmodrom as cosmodrome, or space centre, but it hardly matters as long as we all know what we're talking about.

The decision to put the Soviet Union's principal missile-testing and space-exploration launch site at Baikonur was taken in 1954, when a commission established to find a suitable location reached its verdict. Other candidates included a site in the Mari ASSR in the basin of the middle Volga, on former forest-land cleared during the war to provide timber; and the Makhachkala region on the shore of the Caspian Sea. But Baikonur was chosen, and in the same year work started on the design of Leninsk, the town, later to become a city, to house the people that would work at the space centre.

The main points in Baikonur's favour were its isolation in the Kazakh semi-desert from places where people lived, its proximity to the Syr-Darya river, and the fact that the local terrain would make the construction of roads and railways fairly straightforward. Possibly the deciding factor was its southerly location in Kizil-Orda oblast, which allowed anything bound for space from there to benefit more than the site's two competitors from the earth's rotation: about four per cent of the velocity achieved by payloads launched from Baikonur results from this rotation.

Once the decision was taken, construction moved ahead quite quickly, commencing in February 1955. The space centre was officially accepted into service a little more than two years later, in May 1957, as Instrument-Making Scientific Research Institute Number 5, a facility belonging to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The innocuous name and apparent status were of course a reflection of  those Cold War times. It is not clear how many people were fooled: like Baikonur, Cape Canaveral space centre's main function was in its early days applied military rather than pure science. This was, after all, the Cold War.

The first successful launch came in August 1957: an R-7, a multi-stage intercontinental ballistic missile, which achieved the planned trajectory and delivered its payload within the designated target area. This flight demonstrated the R-7's space potential, and on October 4th  - at 22:28:34 Moscow time to be precise, or by Baikonur time on October 5th at 00:28:34 -  another R-7, launched from pad number 1, put the world's first articifial satellite into near-earth orbit. The satellite weighed 83.6 kg.

Baikonur's other triumphant first came on April 12th 1961 with the world's first manned space flight, Yuri Gagarin on board. Sitting in a Vostok spacecraft he orbited the earth for 108 minutes to land safely again in the village of Smelovskii, in Ternovskii raion of Saratov oblast.

To this day, only two other sites have launched people into space: Cape Canaveral in the US and Szechwan in China. Baikonur's location and the parameters of launches from it were the main determinants of the precise co-ordinates of the International Space Station's orbit: Baikonur remains the principal site for launches to the ISS.

And indeed, it is by far the most important Soviet/Russian space launch site, accounting for around 80 per cent of all Russia's spacebound payload mass and all its payloads intended for geostationary orbit. Among the structures launched from here are the Vostok, Voskhod and Soyuz spacecraft, the Salyut and Mir space stations, Energia and Buran re-usable spacecraft, and numerous satellites and interplanetary research craft. Thus will it probably remain for a good few decades to come: Russia has signed a lease agreement with Kazakhstan which allows it to use Baikonur until 2050 for a rent of around  $115 million per year.

Launches planned for 2008 include two communications satellites, Express AM 33 and 34, and two meteorological ones. There should also be seven spacecraft launches: two of them manned Soyuz craft and the other five cargo trips using Progress ships. Other missions include the launch of a piece of Sterkh hardware needed for the reinstatement of the Kospas-Sarsat search and rescue system and the launch of six Glonass devices.