Tyuratam is a station on the main Moscow to Tashkent railway, located in Kazakhstan. It is near the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Russian, formerly Soviet Union's spaceport, and near the city of Baikonur (formerly Leninsk), which was constructed to service the cosmodrome. Saint Basils Cathedral Moscow listen? ( Russian/Cyrillic: Москва́, pronunciation: Moskva), capital of Russia, located on the river Moskva, and encompassing 1097. ... Tashkent (Toshkent or Тошкент in Uzbek, Ташке́нт in Russian-meaning Stone City in English), the current capital of Uzbekistan, has in the past been called Chach, Shash and Binkent. ... The Baikonur Cosmodrome (Russian: Космодром Байконур, Kosmodrom Baykonur), also called Tyuratam, is the worlds oldest and largest working space launch facility. ... A spaceport is a site for launching spacecraft, by analogy with airport for aircraft. ... Baikonur (formerly Leninsk) is a city in Kazakhstan administered by Russia. ...
It was this launch site that Francis Gary Powers, in his U-2, was trying to locate by following railway lines within the Soviet Union. Up until he was shot down the CIA had systematically been tracking over the major rail networks of the Soviet Union in a bid to find the launch site. Francis Gary Powers (August 17, 1929 – August 1, 1977) was the American pilot whose U-2 plane was shot down while over the Soviet Union, thus causing the U-2 Crisis of 1960. ... The U-2 is a single-seat, single-engine, high-altitude reconnaissance airplane flown by the United States Air Force. ...
Since 1964, the NIIP-5 test range in Tyuratam was responsible for testing of the R-36-O ballistic missiles, whose warheads would reach the orbit on its way to the target.
The remaining launch facilities for the N-1 rocket were rebuilt for the new Energia-Buran system with the addition of some monumental infrastructure, including a brand-new processing building, a full-scale test-firing stand, a "skyscraper" for vertical vibration tests and a super-long landing strip for the Buran orbiter.
Ironically, Tyuratam means "arrow burial ground" in the local language.
As its commander Sergei Alekseenko remembers (51) in an hour after arrival, he and his personnel boarded trucks and traveled for about two and half hours into the steppe, where they were dropped and left only with their backpacks and one-day rations of water and food.
A pair of 1,000-cubical-meter reservoirs and a pair of 3,000-cubical-meter reservoirs were built farther north along the road to the launch complex, and, finally, three 3,000-cubical-meter underground water tanks were built just south of the launch pad.
By the end of 1955, 20 military units were deployed in Tyuratam and its population continued to grow, however, for several years many facilities of the range had remained understaffed.
Feeds |
Contact