5 Things You Need to Know About Star City: The Secret Hub of Russia’s Cosmonaut Elite
- Star City isn’t a city of stars in the sky—it’s a classified, Soviet-era compound near Moscow that trains the world’s most seasoned cosmonauts, including those on the International Space Station.
- Foreign astronauts, including from NASA, have to undergo intense survival drills here, learning to endure freezing forests, blazing deserts, and water recoveries in zero-gravity simulators.
- The facility’s Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center is named after Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, and has a replica of his cramped Vostok spacecraft that you can touch.
- Star City uses a giant underwater pool called the Hydrolab to simulate spacewalks—astronauts float in a 23-meter-deep tank, wrestling with massive mock-ups of satellite modules.
- Access is still heavily restricted; even tourists need special permits and a guide, and they’re banned from snapping photos of certain sensitive areas where future lunar landers are tested.