he Baikonur Cosmodrom (also known as Tyuratam) is the oldest space launch facility in the world. In the mid-1950s, the Soviet military had to find a new test site for its secret rocket program. At the time, cruise and ballistic missiles conceived in the country promised to fly not hundreds but thousands of kilometers. Such range would not fit into existing corridors extending from Kapustin Yar on the Volga River to the steppes of Kazakhstan. After considering four most desolate locations it could find, the government commission made a choice, which horrified even war-burned officers at the Soviet Ministry of Defense. The new test range designated NIIP-5 would be built at the Tyuratam junction on the right bank of the Syr Darya River in Kazakhstan. True, no obstacles for the future missiles existed in this barren steppe, but neither did any bare essentials for the life of thousands of workers. The first military construction team, which landed at the Tyuratam junction in January 1955, found a building of the railway station and a village sheltering few dozen people. In the few months, however, this forgotten place was avalanched with the trains carrying construction workers, the materials and supplies for the future top-secret test site. Only two years later, after unending struggle with dust and heat in the summer and wind and cold in the winter, capricious soils and infectious diseases, thousands of workers have completed a monumental complex for the R-7 ballistic missile. In search, for the Soviet ICBM test site, the US intelligence employed its most sophisticated weapon of the time -- the U-2 high-altitude spy plane. Unreachable for the Soviet interceptors, the U-2s were flying along major railroads of the Soviet Union trying to pinpoint the new test site. In the summer of 1957, only weeks after the first Soviet ICBM test flight, the U-2 mission brought its fruit - the pictures of the R-7 launch pad in Tyuratam. Yet, for decades to come the Soviet government would not confirm the exact location of the test range. In 1961, to register Gagarin's flight as a world record, the Soviet authorities named Baikonur, a mining town 350 kilometers downrange from Tyuratam, as the launch site for the mission. In Tyuratam, the most ambitious human endeavors coexist with the life, which has not changed for centuries. Originated as a nomadic settlement, in 1901 Tyuratam became a water-pump station on the railroad linking Moscow with Tashkent. Ironically, Tyuratam means "arrow burial ground" in the local language. Since 1955, the Russian military has erected a whole new town adjacent to the station of Tyuratam. In the best traditions of secrecy, the town carried numerous official and unofficial names among them: Zarya, Leninskiy, Leninsk and Zvezdograd. In mid-1990s, Boris Yeltsin's decree named the town Baikonur solidifying the decades-long confusion.