Baikonur 2.0: ‘inland-offshore’ space economies in post-Soviet Kazakhstan

ABSTRACT

The global space industry brings to mind the horizons of science and technology, large rockets, and heroic astronauts. The land and infrastructure used to launch things into the cosmos, however, is far less seen. Since the mid-1950s, large territories or ‘fall zones’ in the Kazakh steppe have been used for jettisoning stages of inter-continental ballistic missiles and other kinds of carrier rockets from the Soviet launch complex, in the south west of the country, known as the Baikonur Cosmodrome. In this article, I explore how land leases and use agreements between the Russian Federation and Kazakhstan after the fall of the Soviet Union have upcycled this Soviet era site into a private enclave for the accumulation of capital and waste of a now global space industry. As during the Cold War, launches from Baikonur depend upon thousands of miles of downrange land in Kazakhstan to be catchment areas for toxic fuel and rocket debris that falls from the sky during each and every launch. Here, I introduce the concept of an ‘inland-offshore’, to explain how post-Soviet land and infrastructure lease agreements have created offshore-like political and economic privileges and extraterritorial landscapes of proprietary governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Baikonur
• commercial space industry
• rockets
• fall zones
• extraterritoriality

Acknowledgments

My deep appreciation to my friends and colleagues from Karaganda and Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Without their help, trust, and experience this research would have never happened. I would like to thank the University of Toronto Graduate School for the Research and Travel Grant that helped to fund this project as well as the American Association of Geographers together with the National Science Foundation for their generous Conference Travel Grant. Special thanks to Zachary Androus and Magdalena Stawkowski for their efforts organizing this special edition. To the anonymous peer reviewers, thank you for taking your time and intellectual energies to review this article. Your input was instrumental. Thank you to Greg Hainge, the issue editor for Culture, Theory, and Critique for his labor throughout the publication process and to Roger Allan Alarcon, the production editor for his efforts and attention to detail moving the draft forward to press.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The nations that formed after Soviet Union’s collapse include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

2 In sum, the Russian Federation has access to approximately 11 million hectares of territory and infrastructure in Kazakhstan for military activities, some of which are for mutual use, exclusive of Baikonur (McDermott 2012: 49).

3 The lease terms were renewed in 2005 until 2050.

4 As of 3 June 2020, this has recently changed. The launch of the Space X Dragon was the first piloted launch from the U.S. since 2011.

Additional information

Funding

This research was assisted by funding from the School of Graduate Studies Research Travel Grant at the University of Toronto as well as from the American Association of Geographers-National Science Foundation travel grant.

Notes on contributors

Robert Kopack

Robert Kopack is a full time faculty instructor in the Department of Geography at the University of South Carolina. His research looks at defense site closure, remediation, and reuse projects in Kazakhstan, elsewhere in the former Soviet Union, and North America. Of particular interest to him are the lasting impacts of defense spending and land use practices to environmental history, to local and regional political economy, governance, and public health. He has a second research interest that focuses on the politics, economics, and environmental costs of commercial space launch facilities in the United States. He completed his Doctorate in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto in 2020 under the faculty supervision of Dr. Robert Lewis and Matt Farish.