Tyuratam (Kazakh: Төретам, Töretam; Russian: Тюратам) is a station on the main Moscow to Tashkent railway, located in Kazakhstan. The name is a word in the Kazakh language and means "Töre's grave"; Töre, or more formally, Töre-Baba, was a noble, a descendant of Genghis Khan. Tyuratam is near the Baikonur Cosmodrome, a Russian - formerly Soviet - spaceport, and near the city of Baikonur (formerly Leninsk), which was constructed to service the cosmodrome.
At a press conference for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, Jules Bergman of ABC News asked:
"Baykonur, if you'll look on the coordinates, is 135 miles [217 km] away or something. Tyuratam may only be a railhead, but it is the Tyuratam Launch Complex. They call it Baykonur, I know. . . . I'm going to call it Tyuratam. ABC is going to call it Tyuratam. SAC Strategic Air Command calls it Tyuratam. Can we once and for all straighten that out and arrive at a . . . name for it, Tom?"[1]
It was this launch site that Francis Gary Powers, in his U-2, was trying to locate by following railway lines within the Soviet Union, when he was shot down. Up until that event the CIA had systematically been tracking over the major rail networks of the Soviet Union in a bid to find the launch site.[citation needed]
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Coordinates: 45°40′N 63°20′E / 45.667°N 63.333°E
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