Moon Base a Challenge for Humanity

Academy of Sciences

Star City

Accommodations

The second Conferece Day - November 17th, 2006, will take place in the Star City Conference Hall. In the afternoon, a visit to the facilities of the Yuri Gagarin - The Russian State Research and Testing Centre for Cosmonaut Training is planned.
The access to the place is restricted only to the participants of the conference, who have provided the requested data (passport picture, date of arrival/departure, name of the hotel or address in Moscow).

Origin of Star City
A birth of the manned space flight program in the USSR at the end of the 1950s required the creation of a specialized cosmonaut training facility.
Originated as a secret Air Force facility, Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center has become Russia's only "school of cosmonauts" and one of the most enduring symbols of the nation's quest beyond Earth. Cleverly hidden in the evergreen woods northeast of Moscow, just meters away from a quiet Tsiolkovskaya railroad station on the Yaroslavl Railroad, the center was identified in the Soviet press as Zvezdny Gorodok, translated as Star City or Starry Town. Of course, it would be foolish to try to find "Star City" on Soviet maps...
The chosen location lay 40 kilometers from Moscow, near Chkalovskaya train station on the Yaroslav Railroad. A nearby airfield served as a major hub for some key government aircraft units.

The official decision creating Cosmonaut Training Center, TsPK, was signed on January 11, 1960. Future cosmonauts and their family members moved in the new facility at the beginning of June 1960.
The site consisted of two parts, the training facility itself, which was known as TsPK and a small residential area for the military and civilian personnel serving the facility, as well as cosmonauts and their families. In the early years of the center most of the cosmonaut training would take place at the industrial sites developing hardware for the manned space program. (The OKB-1, the main system integrator of the Vostok spacecraft, was located only dozen of kilometers west along the Yaroslavl Railroad.)

Eventually, the new training center acquired hardware developed specifically for training purposes.
At the height of the Cold War, the Star City was the favorite showcase of the Soviet propaganda -- an advanced and optimistic facade of the Soviet state. However, most ordinary Russians had vague idea about its location and even those who did would be met by a well guarded gates and a fence. Those who managed to get through on jobs or a rare state-organized "excursion" told stories about cosmonauts living in luxury apartment buildings and their wives shopping in stores, which looked like a dream to an ordinary Soviet housewife, exhausted by fruitless search for a decent piece of sausage or children' socks.
With the disintegration of the USSR, the Star City had faced many of the problems that the rest of Russia struggled with for decades -- lack of government funds for infrastructure development and repair, as well as new challenges of transition to a free-market economy.
Local stores lost their exclusive government suppliers and switched to market prices. Even cosmonauts seemed to look for new ways to complement their government pensions -- some asking $250 per interview from visiting foreign journalists. In the meantime, a row of brand-new cottages, which looked like they were transplanted from New Jersey, sprung up in the cozy corner of the town to house NASA astronauts and officials deployed in Star City to support Shuttle-Mir and ISS programs.