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

Abstract

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.