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.

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