Three-thousand miles east of Moscow, out beyond what's left of the Aral Sea, deep in the heart of the ancient Asian steppe, there's a place that, for 60 years, wasn't officially a place at all.

In the beginning it was Tyuratam, nothing more than a station on the Moscow-Tashkent railroad, a whistle-stop so remote it was where Siberians went to get away from it all.

But all that empty land was just what the Soviets were looking for: a Big Sky place where nothing would interrupt radio signals and where, if some giant hunk of metal fell miraculously out of the clear blue, no one would be around to get hurt ... or spread rumors.

Welcome to Baikonur, home of the Cosmodrome.

Gilded Cage
They came in 1955, Sergei Korolyov and his team of rocketeers. Next to the tiny Kazakh village by the railroad, they built an entire modern city to support the families of the men who would make this the most important launch site in the world.

Once they had picked Tyuratam, the Russians kept it as quiet as they could. Until the fall of the Soviet Union, it was a "closed" city -- not even Soviet citizens could visit without special passports. To confuse Western surveillance, the place's name was changed from Tyuratam to Baikonur, which was also the name of a town 200 miles northeast.

Baikonur residents couldn't leave without permission, but they didn't need to. They were the brain trust, treated better than the proles slaving away in the USSR's mines, factories and farms. They had good health care, apartments that weren't collapsing from shoddy workmanship and food that wasn't made out of lard and sawdust.

The Race to Space
The Baikonur rocketeers were good at their jobs. They launched the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7 Semyorka, in 1957 -- only two years after they had built the Cosmodrome. Two months later, they put a satellite on the R-7 and launched it into orbit. Sputnik was born, and it scared the West all to hell. It would take the United States two more interminable years to launch its own ICBM, the Atlas. The Space Race was on ... and the Soviets were in the lead.

Russia's Neil Armstrong
In 1961, Baikonur sent up a human: Yuri Gagarin, History's first genuine spaceman. An athletic engineer and fighter pilot, Gagarin was also 5-foot-2, making him an ideal choice for the cramped Vostok 1 rocket. He orbited the earth once and ejected safely from his capsule four miles above the ground. A year later, John Glenn orbited for the U.S., but still ...
The Moon Belongs to Everyone
With the Gemini and Apollo programs, America finally pulled ahead in the Space Race, landing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in 1969.

But Baikonur has remained the center of non-NASA spaceflight -- even more so now that NASA is downsizing. There are regular joint U.S./Russian flights to the International Space Station, and Baikonur does a lot of heavy lifting for ESA, the European Space Agency.

Most importantly, Baikonur is the only spaceport currently offering genuine tourist flights into the Great Wide Open. Step right up -- all you need is $20 million.