--- description: The official handover of a brand new Soyuz is a milestone for any space flight from Baikonur title: Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6c82c84fa887ddd2/698784b8524fc0e377ded039/soyuz-ready-scott-kelly-year-in-space-web.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Science](/section/science/) ## Science Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [A Year In Space](/tag/a-year-in-space/) ## A Year In Space Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship ## Video: A Year in Space: The Mission [Watch (HLS stream): A Year in Space: The Mission](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/gEqrnCPI.m3u8) (3:59)  _Published 2015-03-24. On March 28, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly begins a historic year in Space. Time follows Kelly and his twin brother, Mark, as they work the test the boundaries of long-term space travel._  by [Jeffrey Kluger / Baikonur, Kazakhstan](/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger / Baikonur, Kazakhstan Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Editor at Large Mar 23, 2015 1:11 PM CUT  Members of the press and officials from NASA and Roscosmos talk with Russian Cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, alongside NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, after a training session at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, March 23, 2015. Members of the press and officials from NASA and Roscosmos talk with Russian Cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, alongside NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, after a training session at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, March 23, 2015.Philip Scott Andrews for TIME  by [Jeffrey Kluger / Baikonur, Kazakhstan](/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger / Baikonur, Kazakhstan Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Editor at Large Mar 23, 2015 1:11 PM CUT No one kept a secret like the old Soviet space program kept a secret. Back in the early days of the space race, Sergei Korolev, the Soviets’ chief designer, was known only as, well, the Chief Designer, the better to prevent any assassination attempts that officials from Roscosmos—the Russian NASA—convinced themselves the Americans were cooking up. Baikonur, the Russian Cape Canaveral, hidden away in the Kazakh steppes, stole its name from a mining town 200 miles north, the better to confuse enemies who might come looking for it. **MORE**: [Watch the Trailer for TIME’s Unprecedented New Series: A Year In Space](http://time.com/space-nasa-scott-kelly-mission/ "undefined") But the secrecy of Baikonur was partly just geography. If you want to get to space you need launch pads that aim away from populated areas and that are located as close to the equator as possible, giving your rockets a boost in speed thanks to the physics of Earth’s rotation. In the U.S. that meant Florida, with millions of people to the west and north but no one at all in the ocean to the east. In Russia, that meant Baikonur. ### PHOTOS: 20 Breathtaking Images of Earth From Space  Aleppo, Syria, May 26, 2013 – The Citadel of Aleppo – medieval fortified palace DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Belfast, Northern Ireland, Nov. 3, 2013 – “Wish,” a large-scale art work DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Utah, USA, April 22, 2013 – Colorado River DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Cuanza River, Angola, April 28, 2013 – Cambambe Dam DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Doha, Qatar, March 4, 2013 – Artificial island spanning nearly four million sq meters. DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Dunalley, Australia, Jan. 6, 2013 – fires, false color image (red = healthy vegetation) DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Australia, April 22, 2013 – Great Barrier Reef DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Gwadar coast, Pakistan Sept. 29, 2013 – new island created by earthquake in Pakistan DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Croatia, Feb. 16, 2013 – Galešnjak (Island of Love) DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Hong Kong, China May 9, 2013 – giant rubber duck DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Madang Province, Papua New Guinea, March 22, 2013 – Manam Volcano DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Namib Desert, Namibia, May 13, 2013 – Sossusvlie area DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Naples, Italy, Feb. 19 2013 – Mount Vesuvius DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Niger, Feb. 13, 2013 – Arlit Uranium Mine DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Schooner Cays, Bahamas, May 26, 2013 DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Sochi, Russia, March 17, 2013 – Site of 2014 winter Olympics DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Near the city of Sur, Oman, Feb. 13, 2013 – massive “green tide” DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Valencia, Spain, July 19, 2013 – Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia and Gulliver Park with an enormous fiberglass model of Lemuel Gulliver trapped DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Versailles, France, Aug. 20, 2013 – Palace of Versailles DigitalGlobe—Getty Images  Xi'an, China, Sept. 24, 2013 – Shiyuan Park DigitalGlobe—Getty Images The Baikonur launch facility—where cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka and astronaut Scott Kelly will lift off for the International Space Station on March 28, with Kelly and Kornienko slated to stay a full year—is a half hour drive into the desert outside of Baikonur proper, which is itself is at least three hours away from pretty much anything at all. The old spaceport, when you finally arrive, looks exactly like you would have expected it to look if you grew up during the cold war when everything Soviet was synonymous with scary. **MORE** [Meet the Twins Unlocking the Secrets of Space](http://time.com/meet-the-twins-unlocking-the-secrets-of-space/?iid=time%5Fspeed "undefined") There are the cement blockhouses and the skeletal gantries and the security fences everywhere, all growing out of the surrounding scrub without so much as a single sapling or tuft of grass to add a little green. You could photograph the place in color, but why bother? But inside Baikonur, none of that matters. Here, the sense of place—or placelessness, really—falls away, replaced by the same kind of closed-world, finely focused, center-of-the-universe bustle that accompanies any launch facility anywhere on the planet. On Monday, at T-minus five days, the three members of the prime crew and the three members of the backup crew were scheduled to run their final ingress drills, climbing into their Soyuz spacecraft, for the first time—or at least the first official time. That, according to more than half a century of custom, required an equally official handoff, in which the people who built the spacecraft would, in effect, turn the keys over to the people who would drive it. The ceremony took place in a large meeting room divided by a glass partition. Representatives from NASA, Roscosmos and the media crowded on one side of the glass and waited until officials from both Roscosmos and Energiya, the state-owned contractor that built the rocket and the spacecraft, entered and sat at a conference table facing the partition. The cosmonauts and astronauts, now in preflight medical quarantine, entered through a door on the other side, and sat at a matching conference table facing the officials.  Cosmonauts and astronauts from both the prime and backup crews greet officials and press before training at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, March 23. Jonathan D. Woods—TIME _The spacecraft is now ready for you_, one of the government men said to the crew in Russian. _It is ready or flight._ The astronauts and cosmonauts nodded their thanks. _Are you ready to go to work?_ _We are,_ answered Pedalka, the commander. A few more words of good wishes and congratulations followed, and then the officials rose, which was the cue for the crew to rise. The little ceremony, weeks in the planning and minutes in the execution, was over. The crews moved to a massive hangar adjacent to the conference room, where multiple spacecraft sit in different stages of flight-readiness. Near the back of the hangar are three unmanned Progress ships, built to carry supplies and cargo to space. Nearby is a Soyuz that will fly later this year, a beautifully ugly, three-pod machine that is nowhere near ready for its launch and still sits with its cables and lines and guts exposed. And at the front of the room is Kelly’s, Kornienko’s and Padalka’s Soyuz, this one hidden inside its sleek, white, 22-ft. (6.7 m) third-stage shell, looking like a proper rocket should look—though still not mated to the second and third stages which will add 155 additional feet (47 m). Caging the third stage is a yellow scaffolding that rises close to the hangar’s ceiling. On the wall, overlooking it all, is a massive blue on white painting of Korolev—the father of everything that is happening here and everything that has happened since the 1950s. The back-up crew climbs the scaffold and enters the cockpit first, spending 30 or 40 minutes there, getting the feel for the spacecraft that, should circumstance warrant, one or more of them could be flying at the end of the week. The prime crew follows. For Kelly, and for his American back-up Jeff Williams, Baikonur is the right place to be spending the last few days on Earth before taking off for a year’s worth of days in space. “It’s very different from home,” Kelly says, “very different from what I’m used to. It’s a good way to separate myself slowly from what’s familiar.” The separation will get a bit harder before it gets easier. Later in the week, his daughters—ages 20 and 12—his girlfriend and his father will arrive in Baikonur for the launch. For his father especially, the experience will be wearing. This is Kelly’s fourth flight, matching the four his twin brother Mark, a retired astronaut, has already flown. “No parent of an astronaut has watched eight launches,” says Kelly. “He’ll hold the record.” This probably, but not definitely, will be the last one the senior Kelly will have to bear. Scott is likely to retire after his year aloft , but space gets deep into an astronaut’s bones. There are few—perhaps none—who’ve flown who haven’t sorely missed the experience when it’s over. Kelly, for all anyone can say, could return. For those who do, Baikonur—ugly and functional and wonderful as the Soyuz itself—will remain the gateway back. _Read next:_ [_Maybe We Really Are Alone In the Universe_](http://time.com/3747812/life-in-space-alone/?iid=time%5Freadnext "undefined") [_Listen to the most important stories of the day._](http://time.com/newsletter/the-brief/?sl%5Fautoplay=true&xid=spl-fullbrief-article "undefined") ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3753854/baikonur-space-station-soyuz/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3753854/baikonur-space-station-soyuz/"},"headline":"Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship","datePublished":"2015-03-23T13:11:05.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T05:04:56.362Z","description":"The official handover of a brand new Soyuz is a milestone for any space flight from Baikonur","url":"https://time.com/3753854/baikonur-space-station-soyuz/","keywords":["A Year In Space","Space","NASA","spacecraft","scott kelly"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6c82c84fa887ddd2/698784b8524fc0e377ded039/soyuz-ready-scott-kelly-year-in-space-web.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jeffrey Kluger / Baikonur, Kazakhstan"}],"articleSection":"Science","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6c82c84fa887ddd2/698784b8524fc0e377ded039/soyuz-ready-scott-kelly-year-in-space-web.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Scott Kelly One Year Mission","caption":"Members of the press and officials from NASA and Roscosmos talk with Russian Cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Gennady Padalka, alongside NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly, after a training session at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Monday, March 23, 20","creditText":"Philip Scott Andrews for TIME","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/science/","name":"Science"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/a-year-in-space/","name":"A Year In Space"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3753854/baikonur-space-station-soyuz/","name":"Russia Gives Space Station Crew the Keys to Its Ship"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Scott Kelly Year In Space Liftoff","description":"Scott Kelly Year In Space Liftoff","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/OnFKS6Nt/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2015-03-27T20:54:01.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/OnFKS6Nt.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/3753854/baikonur-space-station-soyuz/","duration":"PT45S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/3753854/baikonur-space-station-soyuz/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"A Year in Space: The Mission","description":"On March 28, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly begins a historic year in Space. 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