On February 12, 1955, the first military...
The Vostok-1 spacecraft was launched by another R-7 missile on April 12, 1961, taking Yury Gagarin into space.That same day, the media mentioned the Baikonur Space Center for the first time. However, the town of Baikonur was actually located several hundred km to the north in Kazakhstan"s Karaganda Region where a subterfuge test site had been built to keep a theoretical enemy guessing. Leninsk was renamed Baikonur in 1995, four years after the break-up of the Soviet Union.
Kazakhstan currently leases the Baikonur Space Center and the nearby town to Russia under a contract, which is due to expire in 2050. Moscow pays $115 million annually in rent to Astana. In addition to the John F. Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida in the United States and China"s Jiuquan (Chanchencze) Satellite Launch Center (JSLC), Baikonur launches manned space missions.
The test range, which facilitated military projects in the past, has now been transferred to Russia"s
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