Russia's crumbling Baikonur spaceport is Earth's only launch pad for manned flights

Russia's crumbling Baikonur spaceport is Earth's only launch pad for manned flights: https://abcnews.go.com/International/.... Thanks for watching, subscribe for more videos:    / @daviddolan2567   The landscape approaching Russia’s spaceport in Baikonur is otherworldly. The yellow steppe of southern Kazakhstan where it is located is effectively desert, unbroken flatlands for hundreds of miles covered by a layer of scrub. In December, the freezing winds that blow across it encase the scrub plants in ice, making them look like silver coral sprouting out of the sand. Established at the dawn of the Cold War space race in the 1950s, Baikonur is Russia’s chief spaceport and, for now, the only launchpad in the world sending manned flights into space. Since NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, Russia’s Soyuz rockets -- launched from Baikonur -- are the only option for astronauts headed to the International Space Station. The latest Soyuz flight to the ISS took off from Baikonur this week with an American, Canadian and Russian on board. It was the first manned Soyuz mission since a mid-air accident during a launch in October temporarily grounded them. That accident had been the first failed flight with a crew aboard a Soyuz since 1983, and it briefly turned global attention to Russia’s space program and the flights from Baikonur, which normally pass as routine. Beyond this week's launch though, the aging Soviet-era spaceport tells the broader story of Russia’s space program and its troubled existence decades after its Cold War heyday. Empty desert When Soviet military engineers first arrived in 1957, they started building in empty desert. The construction teams, transferred to Kazakhstan after helping rebuild infrastructure in war-shattered Eastern Europe, slept in tents as they labored secretly to erect a rocket pad for the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7. In the 1960s, a planned city was built up to service the launch pads, eventually completed in typical Soviet style around a central square with a Vladimir Lenin statue. High rises, cinemas and cultural centers with names like "Saturn" and "Venus" were also laid out. The Soviet Union’s greatest space feats would be launched from Baikonur, including Sputnik, the world’s first satellite that kicked off the space race, and Yuri Gagarin, the first man to leave Earth. But the spaceport's fate was closely tied to the USSR and as the Soviet Union's economy rotted in its later years, Baikonur struggled and it was already falling into disrepair when communism collapsed in 1991. Baikonur suddenly found itself marooned in the newly independent Kazakhstan. Frozen in the '80s Russia and Kazakhstan’s new governments agreed that Moscow would rent Baikonur and in 2005, the lease was extended until 2050. The city is a closed territory and outsiders, including Kazakhs, need permission to enter. Russian law applies and the checkpoints at the roads into the city are guarded by Russian police. Inside, the city of around 40,000 people seems partially frozen in the 1980s. Constructions sites for new apartment buildings on the Kazakhstan side in some places run right up to city l #Russia, #crumbling, #Baikonur, #spaceport, #Earth, #only, #launch, #manned, #flights #abcnews, #Russia, #NationalAeronauticsandSpaceAdministration, #InternationalSpaceStation, #Kazakhstan, #aerospace, #airlines, #accidents, #ColdWar, #internationalnews, #worldnews, #foreignnews