Russia's Space City Frozen in Time

Malaysia's first space traveler Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor is helped to get off a helicopter while arriving in the town of Kustanai in north-central Kazakhstan, Sunday, Oct. 21 2007, shortly after landing on board a Soyuz spacecraft with two Russian cosmonauts. Malaysia's first space traveler and two Russian cosmonauts endured high gravitational overloads Sunday when a technical glitch sent their Soyuz spacecraft on a steeper-than-normal ride back to Earth, but they landed safely and were feeling fine, officials said.(AP Photo/Sergey Ponomarev,Pool) (Sergey Ponomarev - AP)

As Russia's economy has recovered and oil prices swell, Moscow has begun spending on Baikonur again. The city also benefits from Russia's booming trade in commercial satellite launches and space tourism. In April, Charles Simonyi, the U.S. billionaire who helped design Microsoft Word and Excel, became the world's fifth such tourist, spending $25 million to visit the space station.

So despite its Soviet character _ or perhaps partly because of it _ Baikonur remains a magnet for Russians and Kazakhs looking for a decent job.

Vadim Smirnov, an emergency services official, came in 2000 with his wife Yelena from the southern Russian town of Kapustin Yar.

Pushing his 2-year-old twins in a stroller near a Soyuz booster rocket installed as a monument, Smirnov remarked: "There still is socialism."

In Baikonur there's free healthcare, state jobs, and apartments still owned by the administration and reserved for those working for the city or the launch complex. After 20 years, workers get free apartments and land lots in Russia.

Busts and monuments of figures such as Gagarin and Sergei Korolyov, the father of the Soviet space program, dot the streets and parks.

Baikonur lies by the Syrdarya River, dangerously close to the Aral Sea. Once the world's fourth-largest inland body of water, the sea has turned into a dust bowl of toxic salts because of massive Soviet irrigation projects. Winds carry caustic clouds of the stuff through Baikonur, poisoning the air.

Minerals in the water table kill anything bigger than a desert shrub. So trees have to be planted in massive concrete tubs of soil sunk into the ground.

Yet, Baikonur people feel sheltered from the ills of the big cities. "Here, people speak the same language and are united by a common goal," said Lyubov Bryantseva, a spokeswoman for the city administration.

"There is no other place like Baikonur," said Alexei Tarasov, a 68-year-old colonel and trade union leader who works for the Federal Space Center, one of the Russian agencies that operate the cosmodrome.

He arrived in Baikonur in 1962 as a young army lieutenant. The place "felt like an oven," he recalled, but its residents enjoyed all the privileges the communist system could provide.

"Everything was top secret, but the town itself was amazing," said Tamara Tarasenko, 60, a doctor who moved here in 1971. "There were no bandits, no crime."

By the 1980s Baikonur's population approached 100,000. Despite strict regulations and constant vigilance by plainclothes KGB agents, the engineers and military officers in Baikonur still enjoyed a "certain liberalism" not tolerated elsewhere, said Bryantseva of the city administration.

The reason was Baikonur's importance for Soviet propaganda. This was where the Soviets launched spacecraft headed for the moon, Venus and Mars, as well as cosmonauts headed for earth orbit.

The center may also have played a military role, launching Soviet spy satellites. But no one will talk about that.

Outsiders are sometimes amazed at how efficient the experienced crew of the launch center is, in all weather.

"Rain or shine or sleet or snow don't matter," said Mark Bowman, deputy director of the NASA Human Space Flight Program at Baikonur.

The town is expected to remain the world's primary space gate for decades to come. "We are not a provincial town that will drown in the desert," said Bryantseva.