Asia's space story usually means China, India, Japan. Kazakhstan owns the launch site the space age started from.

Gagarin left from the Kazakh steppe in 1961. Sputnik four years before that. Every one of those vehicles was designed and built about two thousand kilometres away, and the country they launched from didn't exist yet.

I've been going through how Kazakhstan actually governs its space sector, because it's kind of a short but long history.

What did Kazakhstan inherit?

In October 1991, Toktar Aubakirov flew aboard Soyuz TM-13 and spent seven days on Mir. First Kazakh in space, last Soviet cosmonaut. Two months later the USSR dissolved.

So Kazakhstan woke up owning the largest spaceport on Earth — 6,717 square kilometres of it — with no agency, no programme, and no engineers of its own running the place.

The arrangement they landed on in 1994 was a lease. Twenty years, $115 million a year. In 2004 Putin and Nazarbayev extended it to 2050 and agreed the Baiterek project in the same year, framed explicitly as helping Kazakhstan build capability of its own.

Talgat Musabayev flew three times between 1994 and 2001, 342 days in orbit, and on the last flight escorted Dennis Tito, the first space tourist. He went on to run the space agency for seven years. He died in August 2025, aged 74.

When did the country start building its own?

A presidential decree in 2005 started a national programme. Kazakhstan Gharysh Sapary was founded to run it — a national company with 100% of its shares held by the state, through the finance ministry's property committee. Its ten-year plan is approved by government decree. This is not a company with a board deciding strategy.

The National Space Agency, Kazcosmos, was created on 27 March 2007, with Musabayev appointed to run it that April.

Then the hardware. KazSat-1, the first communications satellite, launched in 2006 and control of it was lost in 2008. KazSat-2 followed in 2011, KazSat-3 in 2014. Ghalam, the assembly joint venture with Airbus, was founded in 2010. KazEOSat-1 and -2 launched in 2014. The Space Activity Law passed in 2012. Aidyn Aimbetov flew in 2015 — the third and, so far, last Kazakh in space.

Look at who built all of it: Russian primes, European primes, state companies. A private Kazakh company doesn't appear anywhere in that chain yet. That layer of the industry simply hadn't been built — which makes it the newest thing in the whole story.

Then in August 2014 the agency was folded into an Aerospace Committee inside a ministry, under a government decree on the structure of central executive bodies. It has moved house three times since: Defence and Aerospace Industry, then Digital Development, and since 2025, Artificial Intelligence.

Three headlines and a lie

Three of these are real. One isn't.

1. Soyuz-5 flew from Baikonur's Baiterek complex on 30 April 2026.
2. Baikonur is leased to Russia until 2050 for $115 million a year.
3. Kazakhstan signed the Artemis Accords in 2025.
4. Kazakhstan's space regulator sits inside a Ministry of Artificial Intelligence.

(Answer at the bottom.)

Who runs it now?

Deputy Prime Minister Zhaslan Madiyev, whose Ministry of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development took the Aerospace Committee in 2025. Space policy and AI policy now share a minister, which explains a lot about how the sector is being pitched.

Underneath: KGS operating KazEOSat-1 and -2, the KazSTSAT demonstrator and the KazSat comms satellites. Ghalam doing assembly, out of a complex in Astana that's the first of its kind in Central Asia. Then the science, spread across four independent organisations — the National Centre for Space Research and Technology, the Institute of Space Technique and Technology, the Ionosphere Institute and the Fesenkov Astrophysical Institute, each running its own domain. Baiterek as the joint venture with Russia.

The output is starting to travel. KGS now sells satellites to Mongolia, the Republic of Congo and Nigeria, with up to 60% of components made domestically. Space-based monitoring services have generated a cumulative 977 billion tenge — roughly $2 billion — over five years. In June, KGS signed an agreement in Brussels to digitise national water management using thermal satellite data. Fun fact, right? The AI ministry framing isn't just branding.

The direction is explicit. Tokayev chaired a Security Council session on space in June and told the government to modernise. In July, Madiyev stood in front of the Foreign Investors' Council and invited them into what he called a joint space ecosystem — manufacturing, launches, servicing, Earth observation, analytics.

What does a space licence actually get you?

Here's the part I found genuinely surprising, and it's sitting in plain text in the statute.

Article 5 of the Space Activity Law lists the things that need a licence. Research and development. Design and technological work. The manufacture and testing of experimental, prototype and commercial space hardware. Maintenance and modernisation. Disposal of space objects.

Launching isn't on the list.

On 7 August, a licence went to THRUST, a bootstrapped team in Almaty that built a liquid rocket engine test site and now does contract testing for the national space centre. Their CEO, Sergei Stepanov, described what it gave him:

"What the space licence gives you — it gives you permission to ask for those approvals."

Not permission to fly. Permission to ask. To actually launch, by his account, you need airspace closed so no passenger aircraft are overhead, sign-off from the emergency situations ministry, and a trajectory they agree with.

That isn't just his reading. It's how the law is built. Licensed and cleared to launch are two different documents, and coverage collapses them constantly.

And the licensing article hasn't changed since April 2016. The route has been open for a decade. What's new this year is that somebody walked it.

What it does open is procurement. Government contracts, including at Baikonur — where there's precedent. Site 45 came out of the Russian lease in 2018 and has been run by Kazakh specialists since. It's the pad Baiterek was built on, and where Soyuz-5 flew from in April. Stepanov says talks on other sites are under way, with nothing official yet.

So what happens next?

The stated plan: a domestic meteorological rocket, targeted for this summer after slipping from 2025. A super-light launch vehicle by 2030. Kazakhstan is a member of the China–Russia International Lunar Research Station programme.

THRUST's own route is narrower and more concrete. The test site was built on their own money. Contract testing for the national space centre and commercial customers pays for it now, and the margin goes back into the launch programme — though Stepanov is looking for investors and partners to build the stage after this one.

With that money in place, he reckons two years to a rocket that reaches 100 km. Five to seven years to something that carries a payload to orbit, if they do it alone. Faster if companies split the work rather than each trying to build everything.

That's the shift worth watching. Not the ministry reshuffles, not the memoranda. Whether a route that's been open for ten years now gets used by more than one team.

The pad was always here. The engineering wasn't. That's the part that's finally being built — in Almaty, two days at a time.

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Answer: 3. Kazakhstan hasn't signed the Artemis Accords.

— shirley