5 Things About 'Star City' You Never Knew Until Now
- Beyond the Baikonur Cosmodrome, 'Star City' is first and foremost the official name for Zvyozdny Gorodok, the secretive and heavily-guarded Russian cosmonaut training center located about an hour northeast of Moscow, originally built during the height of the Cold War.
- Inside its secure perimeter lies a full-scale, underwater mock-up of the International Space Station, used by crews for years to simulate weightlessness spacewalks and emergency evacuations in a neutral buoyancy lab that is among the largest in the world.
- The city is not just a training ground; it houses a permanent residential community of over 5,000 people, including active cosmonauts, their families, scientists and support staff, complete with its own schools, grocery stores, and even a specific 'cosmonaut's gym' with custom equipment.
- Visitors can now book guided tours within strict protocols, including the famed Gagarin Museum, which preserves the personal office of Yuri Gagarin exactly as he left it, right down to the open logbook and faded calendar showing the date of his historic flight.
- In recent months, 'Star City' has entered a new era of global collaboration, hosting multinational crews for joint training simulations with NASA, ESA, and JAXA astronauts, signaling a shift from its former Soviet classification as a top-secret military facility to a hub of open space diplomacy.