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2007-10-22 03:35:21
MANSUR MIROVALEV, Associated Press WriterSun Oct 21, 12:40 PM ET
In this remote and rusting town on the barren steppes of Central Asia, the
space race and the Sputnik era seem much more than a memory.
Rockets still pierce the heavens in a halo of smoke during launches, and
engineers and military men still crack open bottles of vodka to celebrate a
successful launch. What has changed are the passengers. Nowadays Baikonur
embraces the world, from wealthy space tourists to the world's first Malaysian
cosmonaut, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, who blasted off for the international space
station on Oct. 10.
The city itself is a rusting relic of the golden age of Russian rocketry, yet
if anything, its place in the space industry is heading toward expansion. For
at least four years after the space shuttle program ends in 2010, the U.S. will
completely depend on Russia and Baikonur to send its crews to the
international space station.
Facilities and equipment are workable but old. Remnants of demolished buildings
and pieces of rusty metal dot the landscape along the roads to the launchpads.
Dozens of apartment blocks that were abandoned after the 1991 Soviet collapse
stand in rows like tombstones, their windows bricked up.
The launch pad used this month was the same one that blasted Yuri Gagarin into
orbit in 1961 to become the first man in space. Sputnik, the first artificial
satellite to orbit the Earth, took off nearby in 1957.
Even the technology hasn't changed much. The Soyuz spacecraft designed in the
mid-1960s is still in service, somewhat modified. It can only be used once, but
costs just $25 million. The newest Endeavor space shuttle cost $2 billion, but
is reusable.
Life and work in Baikonur and its cosmodrome are also pretty much what they
were in the Soviet era.
The town of 70,000 unbearably hot in summer, freezing cold in winter and
dusty year round is isolated by hundreds of miles of scrubland.
Baikonur, once one of the Soviet Union's most secret cities, is still closed to
outsiders and surrounded by barbed wire. Armed soldiers at checkpoints guard
dozens of launch pads, five tracking control centers and a missile test range.
The continuity is especially striking because the 1991 collapse left the
cosmodrome stranded in what had become a foreign country, the former Soviet
republic of Kazakhstan. "We did not know what country we belonged to, but we
kept on launching rockets," said Sergei Kuzmin, a former military officer, now
a city clerk.
Russia rents Baikonur from Kazakhstan for $115 million a year. The mayor is
jointly appointed by the Russian and Kazakh presidents.
"We live under two governments, but unfortunately get only one salary," Kuzmin
noted wryly as he walked the freshly renovated corridors of city hall.
As Russia's economy has recovered and oil prices swell, Moscow has begun
spending on Baikonur again. The city also benefits from Russia's booming trade
in commercial satellite launches and space tourism. In April, Charles Simonyi,
the U.S. billionaire who helped design Microsoft Word and Excel, became the
world's fifth such tourist, spending $25 million to visit the space station.
So despite its Soviet character or perhaps partly because of it Baikonur
remains a magnet for Russians and Kazakhs looking for a decent job.
Vadim Smirnov, an emergency services official, came in 2000 with his wife
Yelena from the southern Russian town of Kapustin Yar.
Pushing his 2-year-old twins in a stroller near a Soyuz booster rocket
installed as a monument, Smirnov remarked: "There still is socialism."
In Baikonur there's free healthcare, state jobs, and apartments still owned by
the administration and reserved for those working for the city or the launch
complex. After 20 years, workers get free apartments and land lots in Russia.
Busts and monuments of figures such as Gagarin and Sergei Korolyov, the father
of the Soviet space program, dot the streets and parks.
Baikonur lies by the Syrdarya River, dangerously close to the Aral Sea. Once
the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the sea has turned into a dust
bowl of toxic salts because of massive Soviet irrigation projects. Winds carry
caustic clouds of the stuff through Baikonur, poisoning the air.
Minerals in the water table kill anything bigger than a desert shrub. So trees
have to be planted in massive concrete tubs of soil sunk into the ground.
Yet, Baikonur people feel sheltered from the ills of the big cities. "Here,
people speak the same language and are united by a common goal," said Lyubov
Bryantseva, a spokeswoman for the city administration.
"There is no other place like Baikonur," said Alexei Tarasov, a 68-year-old
colonel and trade union leader who works for the Federal Space Center, one of
the Russian agencies that operate the cosmodrome.
He arrived in Baikonur in 1962 as a young army lieutenant. The place "felt like
an oven," he recalled, but its residents enjoyed all the privileges the
communist system could provide.
"Everything was top secret, but the town itself was amazing," said Tamara
Tarasenko, 60, a doctor who moved here in 1971. "There were no bandits, no
crime."
By the 1980s Baikonur's population approached 100,000. Despite strict
regulations and constant vigilance by plainclothes KGB agents, the engineers
and military officers in Baikonur still enjoyed a "certain liberalism" not
tolerated elsewhere, said Bryantseva of the city administration.
The reason was Baikonur's importance for Soviet propaganda. This was where the
Soviets launched spacecraft headed for the moon, Venus and Mars, as well as
cosmonauts headed for earth orbit.
The center may also have played a military role, launching Soviet spy
satellites. But no one will talk about that.
Outsiders are sometimes amazed at how efficient the experienced crew of the
launch center is, in all weather.
"Rain or shine or sleet or snow don't matter," said Mark Bowman, deputy
director of the NASA Human Space Flight Program at Baikonur.
The town is expected to remain the world's primary space gate for decades to
come. "We are not a provincial town that will drown in the desert," said
Bryantseva.