Word: baikonur
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...perfect launch day at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Soviet Central Asia. Winds were gusting; a cyclone was reportedly moving in from the Aral Sea. The temperature was near freezing. Flight officials held an urgent meeting, then made their decision: it was a go. Minutes later the Soviet Union's first space shuttle rose, unmanned, out of a giant fireball that spread over the steppe. Looking much like its U.S. counterpart, the white- tiled, double-delta-winged vehicle, called Buran (Snowstorm), made two orbits around the earth, then executed a perfect automated landing a few miles from where it had blasted...
...television pictures beamed to earth last week from the Soviet space station Mir were a series of firsts: the first pictures from space of Astronaut Abdul Ahad Mohmand, 29, an Afghan air force pilot who rocketed from Baikonur space center in Soviet Central Asia to a midweek space-station rendezvous, accompanied by two Soviet cosmonauts; the first pictures beamed by Soviet television of an Afghan orbiting the earth while reading passages from...
From the Kennedy Space Center and the Soviet Union's Baikonur Cosmodrome, powerful shuttles and unmanned rockets lift off week after week, bearing construction modules and fuel supplies to a giant space station in earth orbit. There, skilled workers have been assembling the ship that will take the first humans to Mars. After more than a year of construction, the million- pound, ungainly looking spacecraft is ready. With a crew of eight, it separates from the space station and heads for Mars, following the Hohmann ellipse, a space trajectory that may one day be as familiar as a great-circle...
Last week that trip moved a step closer to reality. From its launching pad at the Baikonur space complex, near Tyuratam in the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, a Proton rocket carrying an unmanned spacecraft rose on an orange and blue column of fire that illuminated the night sky. Turning lazily eastward, the rocket sent the craft off on an ambitious mission: to scout Mars and probe Phobos, one of its two tiny moons. Far below at the sprawling complex, technicians swarmed over a sister ship that is scheduled to be launched this week on a similar mission. Exulted Roald Sagdeyev...
When the 170 million-horsepower Energia rocket thundered from its launching pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome near Tyuratam in Kazakhstan on May 15, the Soviet Union took another stride in its steady march toward pre-eminence in space. Streaking eastward, the massive heavy-lift rocket reached 6,000 m.p.h. and 30 miles in altitude before the first stage separated and dropped to earth as planned. At nearly 14,000 m.p.h. and 60 miles up, the second stage fell away and splashed into the Pacific Ocean "in strict conformity with the flight mission," as the official report put it. Then, unexpectedly...