Celebrating 70 years of the Space Age

The Space Age became a reality 70 years ago today with the founding of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Here are ten things you need to know:

1. 2 June 1955: The Soviet Union founded a secret missile test range and space launch facility, chosen for its remote location and clear skies, some 35km north of the town of Baikonur, located in modern day Kazakhstan.
2. 4 October 1957: Sputnik 1, the world's first artificial satellite, was launched from Baikonur, marking the start of the space race.
3. 12 April 1961: Vostok 1 launched from Baikonur carrying Yuri Gagarin into the history books as the first human in space.
4. 16 June 1963: Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space aboard Vostok 6.
5. 19 April 1971: The age of long-term human space habitation began with Salyut 1, the world's first space station, launched from Baikonur. Over the next years from 1973 to 1982,  Salyut 2 through 7 were launched enabling extended crew missions and scientific experiments in orbit.
6. 15 July 1975: The Soyuz-Apollo mission, the first U.S.-Soviet joint spaceflight, launched from Baikonur.
7. 25 July 1984: Svetlana Savitskaya launched from Baikonur to become the first woman to perform a spacewalk as part of her Salyut 7 mission.
8. 28 March 1994: After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan signed an agreement to lease the cosmodrome to Russia. The lease expires in 2050.
9. 25 April 2002: Mark Shuttleworth launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Soyuz TM-34 to become the first African in space.
10. With the shutting down of the US Space Shuttle programme in 2011, Russian Soyuz  rockets launched from Baikonur became the only way for US astronauts to travel to the International Space Station. This continued until 30 May 2020 when SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission carried NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the ISS, marking the first crewed orbital flight from US soil since the Space Shuttle’s retirement, and the first by a commercial spacecraft.

Since 2011, the Russians no longer rely solely on Baikonur with the founding of the Vostochny Cosmodrome in 2011, but Baikonur will forever be the place where the Space Age began.