Baikonur has had its share of eccentrics—strange men willing to travel to a cut off, ailing town in the middle of the desert to spend $20 million on a trip into space. 
Lance Bass, the hilariously homosexual former N’Sync’er; Charles Simonyi, the creator of Microsoft Word and boyfriend-lover to Martha Stewart (whose vacuum-packed “quail roasted in Madiran wine” was surely sumptuous to palates accustomed to canned Russian cheese); perhaps even Vladimir Gruzdev, the Parliament-funded United Russia politician out for a good junket; these are the names that shall live in pleasantly-envious infamy for those of us anxiously awaiting the days of cheap space tourism.
Of course, what is really worth mentioning when discussing the very salient fact that NASA has let its space program fall into such disarray the comparatively decrepit and underfunded Baikonur will remain the only viable human-capable launch pad in 2010? You should know where this is going…
Argh. Will it never end?
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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