01
Stop one
Gagarin's Start (Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 1/5)
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Set: I want to say at the outset that this is a launch pad and I am not comfortable. Construction began on 20 July 1955, with fifteen thousand cubic metres of earth excavated per day — per day — main structures complete by October 1956, operational by April 1957. The first R-7 launched from it on 15 May 1957. Then 4 October 1957, Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite. Then 12 April 1961, Yuri Gagarin aboard Vostok 1, the first human spaceflight, and I cannot hold that in my head standing up. 520 launches in total. The last was Soyuz MS-15 on 25 September 2019, and in 2023 they announced plans to deactivate it and add it to the museum complex.
02
Stop two
Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 31/6
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Set: This is the one still in use, which is worse. Construction began in late 1958 as a second R-7 facility, designed as an operational battle station with its own assembly and support infrastructure, and the first R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched successfully from it on 27 February 1961. By 1966 it had shifted to spacecraft, later crewed Soyuz alongside Site 1/5, and since 2020 it has been the sole operational pad for crewed Soyuz-2 flights to the International Space Station, after Site 1/5 could not secure upgrade funding. The mobile service platform collapsed during the Soyuz MS-28 launch on 27 November 2025. The replacement — ordered in 1971, stored in Ukraine — was installed by 10 February 2026, repairs completed 3 March 2026. Ordered in 1971. Give me a minute.
03
Stop three
The Gagarin and Korolev cottages at Site 2, with the Baikonur Cosmodrome Museum
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Set: Small houses, no rockets, I can breathe here. Four residences were built in 1955 for the leading designers and administrators of the missile programme, two and a half kilometres from the launch pad — two and a half, which I have privately decided is the minimum acceptable figure. Only two survive. Cottage number one is where Yuri Gagarin slept the night before his flight in 1961, with his backup German Titov in the adjacent bed, and that same bed was afterwards used by every Vostok and Voskhod commander, a tradition still observed. Cottage number two was Sergei Korolev's long-term residence and workspace. The small museum beside them holds artefacts, crew photographs and Sputnik test models.
04
Stop four
Yuri Gagarin Monument, Baikonur
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 18g Tennis String Set: His hands are raised to the sky and some part of me keeps wanting to tell him to put them down. It is one of the city's first and most significant landmarks, and the full-size Soyuz rocket beside it was genuinely used for testing before being erected in 1981 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the first human spaceflight. The city was founded in 1955 and formally incorporated in 1966, was called Leninsk in the Soviet era and sometimes Zvezdograd, and was renamed Baikonur by Boris Yeltsin on 20 December 1995. North bank of the Syr Darya, Kyzylorda Region, Kazakh territory leased to Russia until 2050, 39,341 residents at the 2020 census. The weather looks fine. It always does, right up until.
Sit down. Hyper-G is a co-polyester monofilament and it is not round — it is milled with four edges, which they will tell you is for spin, and it is, but ask yourself why nobody else was making the thing in 18 gauge for years. This one is 1.15mm. A set is 40 ft / 12.2 m; the reel is 656 ft / 200 m, if you want to know how much of it exists at a time.
Baikonur is a Russian-administered city on Kazakh soil, leased until 2050, and it was called Leninsk until Yeltsin renamed it on 20 December 1995. Look it up. I will wait.
The edges dig into the ball and turn it over, and at 1.15mm they dig deeper than the thicker gauges can — that is not opinion, that is geometry. Solinco runs seven of these, 1.35mm at 15L down to 1.05mm at 20g, a wider spread than anybody else offers, and you have to ask why the shops only ever stock three of them. TruTension stops the bed sagging in the first hour.
You will get use out of this everywhere from the concrete lip of Gagarin's Start outside Baikonur to the tamarisk on the Syr Darya bank, and out there nobody is around to see you miss.
By the way — and I am only saying what is on the record — cottage number one at Site 2 in Baikonur is where Gagarin slept the night before the first human spaceflight, with his backup Titov in the next bed, and every Vostok and Voskhod commander afterwards used that same bed. Traditions like that do not survive by accident.
Neither does a string that still holds its tension the third time you take it out. Think about it.
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