The Baikonur Cosmodrome is the world's oldest and largest operational space launch facility. It is located in Kazakhstan, about 200 km east of the Aral Sea, on the north bank of the Syr Darya, near the town of Tyuratam.
It is leased by the Kazakh government to Russia (until 2050) and managed by the Russian Federal Space Agency. It was originally built by the Soviet Union as the base of operations for its space program from the late 1950s to the '80s.
Baikonur 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.
Many historic flights 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. The first astronauts of many other nations, such as France, Germany and Brazil, started their historical journeys from here as well. In 1960 a prototype ICBM exploded before launch, killing over 100 people.
Following the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian space program continued to operate from Baikonur, under the auspices of the Commonwealth of Independent States. In 1995 the city surrounding the spaceport was renamed to Baikonur. On June 8, 2005 the Russian Federation Council ratified an agreement between Russia and Kazakhstan extending Russia’s rent term of the spaceport Baikonur until 2050. The rent price, which is fixed at 115 million US dollars per year, is the source of a long-running dispute between the two countries, that has prompted Russia to begin upgrading its own Plesetsk Cosmodrome in the Arkhangelsk Oblast of Northern Russia as a fallback option.
Baikonur is fully equipped with facilities for launching both manned and unmanned space vehicles. It supports several 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.
