Tyuratam

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Tyuratam (or Turatam) is a station on the main Moscow to Tashkent railway, located in Kazakhstan. The word means in kazakh "töre's grave" (töre - noble, descendant of Genghis Khan. Here: personal Name Töre-Baba). It 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?"^[1]

Bergman thought calling the cosmodrome Baykonur was like referring to Kennedy Space Center as the "Tampa Space Port," but it appeared that the entire area was called Baykonur, much as Texans would talk about the Panhandle or the Gulf Coast.

It was this launch site that Francis Gary Powers, in his U-2, was trying to locate by following railway lines within the Soviet Union, when he was shot down. Up until that event the CIA had systematically been tracking over the major rail networks of the Soviet Union in a bid to find the launch site.