Human kind’s space endeavor debuted in the Soviet Russia 50 years ago at the famous Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, but don’t think that it was an easy lift-off for Sputnik.

Few people now know that the creation of NASA is the result of Sputnik’s launch into space on October 4, 1957. Although the Russian political administration was unconvinced of the palpable results of a space program, one man’s obstinacy to achieve human kind’s dream of venturing into the outer space eventually led to the creation of the small, 58 cm in diameter and weighing approximately 83.6 kg (about 184 lb) satellite we all know by the name of Sputnik (which, in a rough translation, means "something that is traveling with a traveler"). That man’s name is Sergei Korolev, father of the Soviet space program.

Sputnik’s flight took place above the Earth’s surface at a height of 500 miles, and its speed was astounding for that time: 18,000 miles per hour, allowing it to circle our planet in only 96 minutes and to pass over the US seven times a day. Sputnik was only equipped with a simple radio transmitter, which continuously sent “beep…beep…beep” signals towards Earth for 23 days, until October 1957, when the battery died. However, Sputnik continued its regular circling all the way until January 4, 1958, when the atmosphere re-entry caused it to disintegrate.

The era before Sputnik’s take off is as interesting as the better known era that followed the tiny satellite’s launch. The Soviets had chosen Baikonur to build their cosmodrome because of the properties of the place: although it was "a terrible piece of barren steppe" (as Boris Chertok, the deputy director of the ICBM project during the Soviet Russia, described it), it had remarkably low-gravity attributes that would facilitate any space-shuttle’s take off. Don’t be fooled by the “low-gravity” stuff; it has to do with Earth’s rotation, which “flattens” it at the Poles: the centrifuge force which results from the rotation around the axis slightly compensates the gravitational force exerted by our planet, and this is why Earth is not perfectly round. The more you get closer to the Equator, the more the gravitational attraction weakens and the centrifuge force starts to take over.

The Baikonur cosmodrome, which sits in the Southern part of Kazakhstan in a region of flat grasslands northeast of the Aral Sea at 45.6° N, 63.4° E, was initially a place for missiles-testing and it wasn’t even known by that name until Russia’s space program debuted. As it happens with technology in general, there were military purposes that dictated the construction of Baikonur: the Soviet military was searching in the mid-50s for a place to test long-range missiles that would carry nuclear warheads. At that time, the post-Stalin Soviet Russia was indeed in the possession of the nuclear bomb but had no means of transporting it to “capitalist targets” like the US, while the “imperialist” and “decadent” NATO forces had already “planted” bombardiers very closely to the USSR borders.

After considering four most desolate locations it could find on USSR’s immense territory, the government commission made a choice, which horrified even war-burned officers at the Soviet Ministry of Defense. The new test area for ranged missiles would be built at the Tyuratam junction on the right bank of the Syr Darya River in Kazakhstan. True, no obstacles for the future missiles existed in this barren steppe, but neither did any bare essentials for the life of thousands of workers.

At the construction teams’ arrival, in January 1955, the Tyuratam junction was only “endowed” with a central railway station (although in the middle of nowhere “central” loses significance) and a few dozen inhabitants, struggling to live their lives in the scorching heats of the summer and the mind-boggling colds in the winter. The railway station would soon become the point from where thousands of wagons loaded with people and materials needed for excavations, drainage and carving would leave. The workers had to battle inhumane working conditions for two years, fighting the cold, the dazzling steppe heat, the dust that would dwarf any Dust Bowl here in the US, the precarious and often capricious soils and the ravaging effects of infectious diseases characteristic for the dry area, only to achieve the communist government goal of having a secret test site for its R-7 ballistic missile. Many of them died during the course of the agonizing two years, unknown and unmentioned in any official statistics, not only because we were talking about a top-notch military facility with sensitive technologies, but because the KGB and the government had instituted a draconic “code of silence” for everything that had to do with Soviet internal affairs.

Tyuratam (later known as Baikonur) involved lots of people but state censorship forbid each one of them to share their experiences during the relocation to the Kazakhstan steppe. Letters to soldiers and officers employed in the construction had to be addressed to Moscow-400, or Leningrad-300 and in their communications with friends and relatives personnel was strictly prohibited to give any details, which would hint about the location or the purpose of the site. In fact, even high-ranking construction managers in Tyuratam, have not been officially told what they were building, and they were instructed not to ask any questions beyond their direct responsibilities. In most cases the construction personnel had access only to the facilities.

This is actually how the Tyuratam cosmodrome got its name: the Soviets didn’t want the Americans or the Western countries to know about the secret facility (although the US had in the meantime sent its famous U-2 reconnaissance aircrafts and were aware of the isolated place) and “borrowed” for their state and international propaganda the name from a town situated 300 km away from Tyuratam!

This has even an absurd component: when Yury Gagarin’s record of “first man to fly in space” had to be registered, the authorities were put in the impossible situation (from their point of view) of naming the launch site (the Tyuratam facility of course) for the Vostok spacecraft in the letter sent to the International Aviation Federation. Since the “omerta” rules were so strict, the Aviation Sport Commission of the Central Aero-club of the USSR found the “escape route” of using an ambiguous language, naming “the Cosmodrome near Baikonur” (which in Kazakh means "the master with the light brown hair") as the launch site. And so it remained, when the International Aviation Federation registered the record on July 18, 1961. There’s also a cartographical argument for this, besides the military one and the state censorship: Baikonur was at that time the closest town to Tyuratam and also the first identifiable (and credible) location on the map, in range of the launch site. To give you an idea of how isolated the place was supposed to remain, Russian scientist Arkady Ostashev, who was a member of the team involved in testing rockets that would carry Sputnik in space, confessed that along with his colleagues he used to catch scorpions, put them in glass jars and watch them fight to the death, just to see some action in that idle vastness…

Eventually, the Soviet press propagated the name “the Baikonur Cosmodrome”, despite the fact that the Western countries knew about Tyuratam (actually, a pre-World War 2 German map was so exact that it did mention the railway station’s ramification into the steppe).

However, since old habits die hard, even 20 years after Baikonur Cosmodrome’s construction the Soviets were still reluctant in revealing the military nature of the facility. Colossal propaganda masquerades were staged during Charles de Gaulle’s visit in order to conceal the technical difficulties or the military activities running in the background. The masquerade went even further when US officials from NASA arrived there in the mid-70s, to loosen up the tension of the Cold War and to establish the details of the first joint space mission, the Soyuz-Apollo docking. NASA’s officials were greeted by men dressed in casual clothes, but with shaved heads that clearly indicated their military appurtenance! Veterans from the Soviet space era indicated that this type of behavior prolonged even until 1988 at Tyuratam, when the Phobos mission debuted.

Anyway, it was at this agitated place that Sputnik’s first and last space travel debuted, 50 years ago on Thursday. The satellite’s launch surprised the Western civilization and even took the Soviet officials by surprise, because they were simply not prepared for the huge media coverage that followed in the capitalist countries, and only later came to realize the potential propagandistic impact of the space-race. But the person who deserves the praises of future generations remains Sergei Korolev, who, after seeing Sputnik’s achievement, said to his colleagues: "Congratulations, the road to the stars is now open…"