Baikonur

A missile base on the steppe

The Soviet Union built the centre in the mid-1950s as a base for long-range missiles, and later added the facilities for spaceflight.^[5] Like the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, it was put somewhere remote on purpose: deep in the Kazakh steppe, with few people and far from the big industrial cities.^[2]

“Baikonur” was a Soviet code name. American analysts often called the site Tyuratam, after the nearby railway station. It lies on the north bank of the Syr Darya, about 160 km northwest of Qyzylorda, and Soviet secrecy led people to confuse it with a different town called Baikonur, about 320 km to the northeast.^[5]

Some of the most famous flights in history left from here: the first artificial satellite in 1957, Yuri Gagarin’s first crewed orbital flight in 1961, and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, in 1963. The town that served the base became a city in 1966 and was named Leninsk.^[5]

Renting a cosmodrome

When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, the cosmodrome ended up in independent Kazakhstan, and Russia carried on running it.^[5][3] Keeping it was one of Russia’s priorities. On 28 March 1994 the two countries signed an agreement on the basic principles for using the cosmodrome, followed the same year by a lease, with the rent set at $115 million a year.^[2] In October 1994 a decree by Russia’s president ordered the government to take over the Baikonur complex from Kazakhstan’s.^[6]

Little real money changed hands at first. Until 1999 Russia paid mainly by cancelling part of Kazakhstan’s state debt, and partly in goods.^[2] Kazakhstan often complained that the fee was too low and did not cover the environmental damage from launches.^[3]

In January 2004 Vladimir Putin and Nursultan Nazarbayev extended the lease to 2050. The financial terms were not published, and Kazakhstan’s main gain was a bigger part in the base, including training Kazakh cosmonauts there.^[3] At the time it was Russia’s only launch site for crewed missions.^[3]

A city run from two capitals

A 1995 agreement on the city’s status says Baikonur is an administrative unit of Kazakhstan that operates under the lease. A special representative of Kazakhstan’s president watches over the rights of Kazakh citizens living or working there, while Russian law covers Russia’s own staff and their families.^[2]

In practice the city has a Russian administration, but its head is appointed jointly by the two presidents. There are two police forces, two prosecutor’s offices and two court systems, and shops and public offices work in roubles. In 2025 the city had 56,400 registered residents, 32,400 of them Kazakh citizens.^[1] Earlier counts were higher: more than 70,000 people in 2012, about 40% of them Russian citizens.^[4]

Crashes, protests and a smaller lease

On 2 July 2013 a Proton-M rocket carrying three GLONASS navigation satellites crashed seconds after lift-off. The toxic fuel it carried, heptyl, caused a public outcry in Kazakhstan, with small protests outside Russian missions in Almaty and Astana. That year Kazakhstan, citing the environment, approved only 12 of the 17 Proton launches Russia asked for.^[2]

In 2012 the head of Kazakhstan’s space agency, Talgat Musabayev, told parliament that the 1994 rent agreement had “run its course” and that bringing the cosmodrome under Kazakh jurisdiction was being considered.^[4] The lease survived, but in 2019 Kazakhstan took back 11,600 hectares of it for roads, a railway, a gas pipeline and the nearby village of Toretam, without cutting Russia’s rent.^[7]

Russia has been building its own cosmodrome, Vostochny, in its Far East. In 2014, 75% of Russia’s launches still went from Baikonur, and Roscosmos planned to move most of them to Russian soil by 2030.^[2]