Baikonur Cosmodrome

Baikonur put Sputnik into orbit in 1957. Four years later it launched Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to leave the planet. That history is why the cosmodrome still carries weight far past its size on a map — but the ground underneath it belongs to Kazakhstan, not Russia. When the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, Kazakhstan inherited the site outright, and Moscow had to negotiate for the right to keep flying rockets from it. The two sides settled on a lease in 1994: $115 million a year, plus upkeep costs. A decade later, Presidents Putin and Nazarbayev pushed that arrangement out to 2050, and Kazakhstan's parliament eventually signed off on the full extension.

Before cosmonauts, there were missiles. Baikonur was built to test intercontinental ballistic weapons, and crews fired R-36 and UR-100N rockets from silos scattered across the surrounding steppe well into the 1980s. Formal Russian military operations at the site ended in 2005 — on paper. Three years later, an aging UR-100N still flew a test launch from Baikonur, so the line between retired and dormant has never been entirely clean. According to a facility profile from the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), these days the cosmodrome runs mostly civilian and commercial traffic: Soyuz crews bound for the International Space Station, satellite launches, a dwindling number of Proton flights before Russia retires that rocket for good in 2026. Roscosmos still describes the facility, officially, as serving both military and civilian purposes.

The partnership has gotten rockier. In 2023, Kazakh bailiffs impounded property belonging to Russia's Space Infrastructure Center over an unpaid $30 million bill tied to environmental damage from Soyuz-5 test flights. Two years later, Kazakh media floated something bigger — reports that Russia could walk away from the lease entirely sometime between 2026 and 2028, as Moscow pulls back from the ISS and international space cooperation more broadly. Astana pushed back hard and called the reports false. Then, in late 2025, a service cabin on one of the launch pads was damaged during a crewed Soyuz mission, and repairs dragged into early 2026. None of it touches the 2050 lease on paper. All of it suggests the arrangement is under more strain than either government wants to admit.