Tyuratam

Tyuratam (Kazakh: Төретам, Töretam; Russian: Тюратам) is a station on the main Moscow to Tashkent railway, located in Kazakhstan. The name is a word in the Kazakh language and means "Töre's grave"; Töre, or more formally, Töre-Baba, was a noble, a descendant of Genghis Khan. Tyuratam is near the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Russian - formerly Soviet - spaceport, and near the city of Baikonur (formerly Leninsk), which was constructed to service the cosmodrome.

At a press conference for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, Jules Bergman of ABC News asked:

"Baykonur, if you'll look on the coordinates, is 135 miles [217 km] away or something. Tyuratam may only be a railhead, but it is the Tyuratam Launch Complex. They call it Baykonur, I know. . . . I'm going to call it Tyuratam. ABC is going to call it Tyuratam. SAC Strategic Air Command calls it Tyuratam. Can we once and for all straighten that out and arrive at a . . . name for it, Tom?"

In the mid 1950s, the Soviet Union announced that space activities were being conducted from the Baykonur Cosmodrome, which was assumed to be near the city of Baykonur, in the Kazakh SSR. In reality, the launch facilities were located 400 kilometres (250 mi) to the southwest at Tyuratam to obfuscate the west as to its true location.

It was this launch site that the CIA was trying to locate by systematically tracking over the major rail networks of the Soviet Union in Central Asia with U-2 spy planes. The site was discovered and photographed in 1957. Francis Gary Powers was scheduled to overfly it on his ill-fated mission in 1960, but either due to detecting the guidance radar of the defending SA-2 missile battery or cloud cover which prevented him from photographing the site, he avoided Tyuratam and was later shot down over the Ural mountains.

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Wikipedia