Editing Baikonur Cosmodrome (section)

==ICBM testing==
Although Baikonur has always been known around the world as the launch site of Soviet and Russian space missions, from its outset in 1955 and until the collapse of the USSR in 1991 the primary purpose of this center was to test liquid-fueled [[ballistic missile]]s. The official (and secret) name of the center was '''State Test Range No. 5''' or '''5 GIK'''. It remained under the control of the Soviet and [[Ministry of Defense (Russia)|Russian Ministry of Defense]] until the second half of the 1990s, when the Russian civilian space agency and its industrial contractors started taking over individual facilities.{{citation needed|date=June 2012}}<!-- but the military space forces ran the space programme, there wasn't a civilian space agency. Was it actually primarily for the strategic rocket forces?-->

In 2006, the head of Roscosmos, [[Anatoly Perminov]], said that the last Russian military personnel would be removed from the Baikonur facility by 2007. However, on 22 October 2008, an [[UR-100N|SS-19 Stiletto]] missile was test-fired from Baikonur, indicating this may not be the case.<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE49L2L320081022|title=Russia test-fires old missile to extend lifespan|work=Reuters|date=22 October 2008|access-date=2 July 2017|archive-date=19 October 2020|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201019133013/https://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE49L2L320081022|url-status=live}}</ref><!-- rocket?-->