Baikonur

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Baikonur

Baikonur (; ), formerly known as Leninsk, is a city in Kyzylorda Province

Kyzylorda Province

Kyzylorda is a provinces of Kazakhstan of Kazakhstan. Its capital is the city of Kyzylorda, with a population of 157,400. The province itself has a population of 590,000....
of Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan, also Kazakstan , officially the Republic of Kazakhstan, is a large Eurasian country in Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Ranked as the List of countries by area as well as the world's largest landlocked country, it has a territory of 2,727,300 km? ....
, rented and administered by Russia

Russia

Russia , or the Russian Federation , is a list of countries spanning more than one continent country extending over much of northern Eurasia....
. It was constructed to service the Baikonur Cosmodrome

Baikonur Cosmodrome

Boris Yeltsin

Boris Nikolayevich Yeltsin was the first President of the Russian Federation, serving from 1991 to 1999.Yeltsin came to power with a wave of high expectations....
on December 20, 1995.

The shape of the area rented is an ellipse, measuring 90 kilometres east to west, by 85 kilometres north to south, with the cosmodrome at the centre.

The original Baikonur is a mining

Mining

Mining is the extraction of value minerals or other geology materials from the earth, usually from an ore body, vein or seam. Materials recovered by mining include base metals, precious metals, iron, uranium, coal, diamonds, limestone, oil shale, Sodium chloride and potash....
town a few hundred kilometres northeast, near Dzhezkazgan

Dzhezkazgan

Zhezkazgan, also known as Zhezqazghan , is a city in Karagandy Province, Kazakhstan, on a reservoir of the Kara-Kengir River. It has a population of 90,000 ....
in Kazakhstan's Karagandy Province

Karagandy Province

Karagandy is a provinces of Kazakhstan of Kazakhstan. Its capital is Karagandy. The population of the province is 1,375,000; that of the city is 437,000....
.

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Encyclopedia

Baikonur (; ), formerly known as Leninsk, is a city in Kyzylorda Province

Kyzylorda Province

Kyzylorda is a provinces of Kazakhstan of Kazakhstan. Its capital is the city of Kyzylorda, with a population of 157,400. The province itself has a population of 590,000....
of Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan

Russia

Baikonur Cosmodrome

Boris Yeltsin

Mining

Dzhezkazgan

Karagandy Province

Karagandy is a provinces of Kazakhstan of Kazakhstan. Its capital is Karagandy. The population of the province is 1,375,000; that of the city is 437,000....
. The launch site was given this name to cause confusion and keep the location secret. This town was specifically chosen because the flight path of the rockets that launched many Soviet satellites, including the first Sputnik, passed over its vicinity. The name Baikonur is Kazakh for "wealthy brown", i.e. "fertile land with many herbs". The railway station there, however, predates the base and keeps the old name - Tyuratam

Tyuratam

Tyuratam is a station on the main Moscow to Tashkent railway, located in Kazakhstan. The name is a word in the Kazakh language and means "T?re's grave"; T?re, or more formally, T?re-Baba, was a noble, a descendant of Genghis Khan....
.

The fortunes of the city have varied according to those of the Soviet

Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
/Russian space program and its Baikonur Cosmodrome

Baikonur Cosmodrome

The Baikonur Cosmodrome , also called Tjuratam, is the world's first and largest operational Spaceport. It is located in the desert steppes of Kazakhstan, about east of the Aral Sea, north of the Syr Darya river, near Tyuratam railway station....
.

The Soviet government established the Nauchno-Issledovatel'skii Ispytatel'nyi Poligon N.5 (NIIIP-5), or Scientific-Research Test Range N.5 by its decree of 12 February 1955. The U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance plane found and photographed for the first time the Tyuratam missile test range (cosmodrome Baikonur) on 5 August 1957. See a composite satellite image of the early Tyuratam launch complex, the cosmodrome (30 May 1962).

Baikonur

See also

External links