The Soviet Union began building the facility under a veil of secrecy in January 1955, intent on beating its arch-enemy the United States in the race to space.

The construction, in a remote area of the Kazakh steppe, took place several hundred kilometers (miles) from the Kazakh village of Baikonur, to pull the wool over Washington's eyes in case its spies came looking.

On May 5, 1955, the foundation of what was first known as Leninsk and today the city of Baikonur was laid. Less than a month later, on June 2, the Soviet military announced the establishment of an experimental research and science facility at Baikonur, the official founding date of the cosmodrome.

It took some 2,500 soldiers and civilians one year to complete the facility, working in extremely harsh conditions where temperatures can drop to -30 degrees Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit) in the winter and climb to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) at the height of summer.

The first launch -- that of an intercontinental ballistic missile codenamed R-7 -- took place on May 15, 1957, but the missile blew up after takeoff.

Some five months later, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union placed the first man-made satellite ever into orbit. The Sputnik, with its characteristic chirp beamed back to earth, beat the United States by a humiliating four months.

The first man to orbit the earth, Yuri Gagarin, blasted off from Baikonur in April 12, 1961, as did Valentina Tershkova, the first woman to make it into space, in 1963.

More than 1,000 satellites and dozens of cosmonauts and later astronauts have rocketed into space from here. As the Soviet Union spiralled towards dissolution in the late 1980s, Baikonur, which had largely benefited the Russians, fell on hard times and it came close to being shut down.

But space exploration picked up again, especially as international clients became heavy users of the facility.

In 2004, 13 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia signed a lease with Kazakhstan to launch from the cosmodrome through 2050, costing it 115 million dollars (94 million euros) a year.

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