The world's largest and oldest space launch facility, built by the Soviet Union in 1955 as a strictly closed military complex kept a secret from the West, Baikonur has become key to the US space program.

With the shuttle fleet grounded after the Columbia disaster, the United States had to turn to Russia to send its astronauts to the International Space Station, and on Saturday a Soyuz rocket will lift off carrying US cosmonaut Edward Lu and his Russian companion Yury Malenchenko.

The cosmodrome, which runs 85 kilometres (53 miles) from north to south and 125 kilometres from east to west, is a sprawling zone that includes state-of-the-art facilities but also ruined buildings that scar the landscape.

US astronaut Michael Foale, who is well acquainted with the Russian space program having spent 134 days on board the Mir space station in 1997 and is a back-up for Lu on this flight, is full of admiration.

"The buildings used are modern-day standard. Unused buildings are truly in disrepair, but that is a testament to the long history of Baikonur. There is plenty of land here," he told AFP.

Baikonur served as the launch site for Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit the Earth, on October 4, 1957, marking a giant technological leap for the Soviet Union against the United States.

The Soviet Union's chief space designer, Sergei Korolev, spent months at a time here living in a modest wooden house that today is a museum.

The base was plunged into crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, with the winter of 1993-94 particularly severe due to shortage of food and heating and launch delays and accidents.

But Baikonur is now used for commercial and satellite launches and sending manned rockets and cargo vessels to the International Space Station.

A deadly accident last year, when eight workers died after a roof collapsed at one of the hangars used for assembling and testing space vehicles, showed the dangers of disrepair.

But despite the crushed metal and concrete, Starsem, a European-Russian company working on the commercial launches and the Mars Express, a European Space Agency probe due to be launched in June 2003, continues to work from the building where the accident took place.

Some grandiose dreams at Baikonur have faded. A huge launch-pad used to test the Buran, a Russian version of the Shuttle, has been mothballed for a decade, and the rusty metallic construction is maintained at a bare minimum to protect it from irreversible decay.

Gennady Yarygin from the space constructor Energiya is bitter but resigned about the scrapping of the program, which made just one flight in 1988, returning from orbit successfully, and was planned to fly eventually to Mars.

"I am very sad. Many high-ranking people now regret this. But you know the political situation at that time. It's all a question of money. Colossal funds were sunk into this project. To continue it, you would have needed even more," he said.

The cosmodrome itself, under sovereignty of the newly independent republic of Kazakhstan since 1991, is still leased to Russia under a 1994 agreement.

But Kazakhstan accuses Russia of damaging the ecology of its territory and in the wake of two accidents during the launch of Proton rockets in 1999 banned Proton launches for several months.

Moscow therefore plans to switch launches of satellites to the Plesetsk cosmodrome in the far north of Russia, in a bid to minimise outside intervention, although manned missions will still be undertaken from Kazakhstan.

Still, the mystique of Baikonur for Russia's exploration of space remains spellbinding.

"Russia was, is, and will remain a great space power," proclaims the entrance to Baikonur's space museum, which lists in painstaking detail the achievements of the past half a century.

SPACE.WIRE