Baikonur
Baikonur is a city in Kazakhstan on the northern bank of the Syr Darya river. It is currently leased and administered by the Russian Federation as an enclave until 2050. It was constructed to serve the Baikonur Cosmodrome with administrative offices and employee housing. During the Soviet period, the town was known as Leninsk, and was sometimes referred to as Zvezdograd. It was officially renamed Baikonur by Russian president Boris Yeltsin on December 20, 1995.
The Russian controlled area is an ellipse measuring east to west by north to south, with the cosmodrome situated at the area's centre.
Foreign visitors and tourists can visit the cosmodrome and city but need to obtain a specific permit from Roscosmos.
History
The original Baikonur is a mining town located about northeast of the present-day spaceport, near Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan's Karagandy Region. In the run-up to the Vostok 1 flight in April 1961, Soviet authorities deliberately applied the name "Baikonur" to the launch site to obscure its true location. Residents of the mining town briefly exploited the confusion to obtain scarce materials before officials discovered the misunderstanding.The modern city of Baikonur was built several kilometres south of the existing railway settlement of Töretam, which predates the cosmodrome. Töretam, located on the Trans-Aral Railway, served as the original railhead in the region and gave the early test range its first widely used name, "Tyuratam".
The fortunes of the new city have risen and fallen with the Soviet and later Russian space programme and the operations of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Due to its military and scientific significance, the settlement was a closed city during the Soviet period and did not appear on publicly available maps before perestroika.
The Soviet government formally established the Scientific-Research Test Range No. 5, or by decree on 12 February 1955. The U-2 reconnaissance aircraft first identified and photographed the Tyuratam missile test range on 5 August 1957.
Most local landmarks reflect the city’s close ties to the space programme, with only a few exceptions such as the preserved locomotive, an Orthodox church, and a mosque.
Administratively, the city belongs to the Odintsovsky District of Moscow Oblast in accordance with internal Russian arrangements, but it remains an administrative unit of Kazakhstan. Under the bilateral agreement between Russia and Kazakhstan, Baikonur is granted an unofficial status equivalent to a Russian city of federal significance for the duration of the lease of the Baikonur complex.