Tereshin, Makar;
(2025)
Falling back to Earth: Politics and Ecology of the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Abstract
Following the key infrastructural nodes of the Russian space industry in Kazakhstan, this thesis examines communities, ecologies and economies that form in and around the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Interrogating the politics and ecology of Baikonur, it investigates how the space industry mediates different ethical and political projects at different scales: advancing space exploration, subjecting communities to systematic inequality and environmental injustice, and providing a livelihood. Bringing the focus of space exploration back down to Earth, this project addresses the need for ethnographic attention to the politics and histories of the infrastructures that support the Russian space industry. It foregrounds specific "topographies of power" (Ferguson, 2006), exploring the uneven socio-political, economic, and environmental relations that underpin the operation of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. My primary ethnographic focus is the city of Baikonur, a Soviet-built company town that continues to serve the cosmodrome under the terms of the long-term lease to Russia. Here, the space industry structures access to employment, housing, education, and public infrastructure, reproducing hierarchies and entitlements shaped by both Soviet legacies and contemporary Russian-Kazakhstani regimes of governance. Yet the Baikonur complex cannot be understood in isolation from the territories beyond its perimeter. The functioning of the cosmodrome depends on rural zones where rocket stages routinely fall—areas where the material and environmental costs of spaceflight are most viscerally encountered. Far from being peripheral, these territories, known as fallout zones, remain integral to the spatial and infrastructural logic of the Russian space industry. By tracing connections between the cosmodrome, the closed city and the communities living under rocket trajectories, I demonstrate how the Russian space industry is encountered, evoked, and understood across its dispersed geography
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Falling back to Earth: Politics and Ecology of the Baikonur Cosmodrome |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > SSEES UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > SHS Faculty Office UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > SHS Faculty Office > UCL Institute for Advanced Studies UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215442 |
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