TRIP TO BAIKONUR (Strom Steven Ray)

I recently had the opportunity to visit the Russian Federation launch site of Baikonur, now located in Kazakhstan, where I witnessed the Sept. 30 launch of a Soyuz and its three cosmonauts to the International Space Station. All arrangements for the Russian segments of this tour were made by Country of Tourism travel agency, located in Moscow, and I can say without any hesitation that Country of Tourism equaled the service of an American travel agency that I had previously ranked as my number one choice for quality service. My trip schedule – Moscow to St. Petersburg and return to Moscow; roundtrip Moscow to Baikonur – required reservations for hotels, train tickets, air tickets within Russia, additional guides and tours within Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the permissions needed to attend the launch and involved several wire transfers of bank funds to hold the reservations and for payment of the tour. Not once was there any delay in hearing back from my principal guide, Venera Yamandi, nor were there even remotely any errors in schedule arranging. I was met by a driver and/or guide at each stop, no one involved with my tour was ever late, and Venera went out of her way to make certain that I left the train station on schedule, that my guide in Leningrad met me, that all arrangements with hotels were fine, and she also acted as interpreter every time I needed to shop or buy something. In short, the Country of Tourism agency is an excellent and reliable tour company.

Established by the Soviet Union in1955 as a testing facility for the R-7 missile, Baikonur Cosmodrome was the site of the earliest great achievements of the Space Age – the world’s first ICBM, the R-7, and first satellite, Sputnik 1, were both launched from here in 1957. Later that same year, Laika the dog became the first living creature to reach space aboard Sputnik 2, and in April 1961 cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to reach space and orbit the Earth. All of these missions were launched from Baikonur’s Space Pad 20, known today as “Gagarin’s Pad.” No matter what political affiliation present-day Russians have, Gagarin remains a national hero with an almost cult-like following. Statues of Gagarin and posters with his beaming face can be seen all over Russia; he represents one of the proudest moments in 20th-century Russian history, when the entire world praised Russian technological and scientific know-how. In addition, his working-class background enabled the average Russian to identify more closely with Gagarin’s achievement.
The flight from Moscow to Baikonur is a three and one-half hour, 2400 km trip on Ural Airlines. Your first impression as the plane begins to descend onto the runway is one of unremitting vastness. The absolutely flat, dry, dirt-brown steppe, which has minimal elevation, extends for hundreds of miles around Baikonur, and it was the vast, largely empty landscape that was one of the main reasons the site was selected by the Soviets. Following the breakup of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, Baikonur found itself within the boundaries of the newly independent nation of Kazakhstan, so the Russian Federation now leases the base from the Kazakhs. After landing at the cosmodrome and passing through Kazakh customs and passport control, we boarded a bus for the 20-km trip into the town of Baikonur, situated beyond the boundaries of the enormous launch site, which measures some 75 km north to south and 90 km east to west. On occasion, we saw camels foraging in the desert, one of the many incongruous scenes near the cosmodrome, which is a curious mixture of 21st-century technology and Kazakh lifestyles that have scarcely changed in centuries.
Approximately 70,000 people live in Baikonur, which seems to be something of a pale reflection of what it must have looked like at the height of the Soviet space program. There are two primary hotels in the town, and my tour group was lodged at the Hotel Centralnaya, which fronts what is still known today as Lenin Square, complete with an enormously massive statue of Lenin, one arm outstretched, overlooking the plaza. The first evening, newly arrived visitors were greeted by a troupe of Kazakh belly dancers, which probably wasn’t the best choice of entertainment for an audience comprised almost entirely of male students below the age of 21, who had started drinking even before we left the Moscow airport.
The morning of 30 September, we left the hotel at 5:00 for the bus ride to the launch site for Expedition 21 (Russian flight designation: Soyuz TMA-16). There are checkpoints along the route from the town of Baikonur to the cosmodrome in order to be sure that the bus driver and bus have legitimate access to the base. Tourists assembled around Assembly and Test Facility No. 254, where the cosmonauts waited indoors in a decontaminated room for the official launch go-ahead. The three crew members – flight engineer Jeff Williams, mission commander Max Suraev, and space tourist Guy Laliberte, the billionaire founder of the Cirque du Soleil – walked outside about 90 minutes after our arrival, faced the flight review commission, and heard two brief phrases: “The crew is ready for spaceflight,” and “Good luck.” The cosmonauts then boarded a bus, autographing photos for tourists along the way, to take them to Launch Pad 20, and were followed by another bus with the flight’s backup crew. Amazingly, considering that the first crewed launch was 48 years ago, the launch would take place from the very same pad, Site 1 at the time, where Yuri Gagarin was launched into orbit.
Including our guide, there were four people in my English-speaking tour group, although many Russians were on hand to see the launch, as well as few dozen Canadians to witness the launch of Laliberte. Virtually all of the Canadians wore red clown noses for fellow countryman Laliberte, who worked as a circus clown for many years. In fact, numerous media reports referred to Laliberte as the “first space clown,” a title he seemed to enjoy. The other two members of my tour group were a German businessman currently living in Russia and Faheed Lafta, dubbed the “Arab Gagarin” by the Arabic press after he became the first person from the Arab world to complete cosmonaut training and receive certification to fly in space. Venera studied three years in the United States, so thankfully her English was fluent. Aside from the fact that I know about three Russian vocabulary words, almost all signage throughout Russia and Kazakhstan were only in the Cyrillic alphabet.