"Rip out the heart of their space program. Eradicate their long-range missile project. Take out the Ascension Group. Nazis, scientists, co-opted by the Russians after the war."
— Interrogator, Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010)
The Cosmodrome
Unlike most of the settings catalogued elsewhere in this Archive, the cosmodrome is the rare Soviet-coded location that fiction reaches for as a symbol of achievement rather than menace. Rocket gantries, launch pads, and the skeletal frames of boosters under construction carry an association with genuine national accomplishment — the Soviet Union having reached orbit, and put a man there, before anyone else on Earth — which makes the cosmodrome function differently from the frozen wasteland or the derelict factory even when a given story still ends up staging violence there. More often than not, the location is treated as something worth sabotaging specifically because it works, rather than something already broken and waiting to be exposed.
Call of Duty: Black Ops — Baikonur as Cold War Flashpoint
Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) sets its fourth mission, "Executive Order," at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakh SSR, where CIA operatives Alex Mason and Frank Woods infiltrate the facility to destroy the Soyuz 2 rocket moments before its launch, in a strike timed to also target General Dragovich, who is present to observe it personally. The mission's tension depends on the cosmodrome functioning exactly as intended — Soyuz 1 has already launched successfully by the time the player arrives, and the site is depicted as an active, high-security space program rather than a ruin. The same location resurfaces later in the game's Zombies mode on the map "Ascension," again framed as a functioning Soviet space facility, this time overrun following a catastrophic teleportation experiment conducted by scientists attached to the site.
Tom Clancy's EndWar — The Cosmodrome as Living Institution
Tom Clancy's EndWar (2008) takes the least adversarial approach to the location of any example here. Added as a downloadable battlefield, its own in-game description frames the Cosmodrome not as a menace to be neutralized but as a still-functioning, historically rooted institution: "outdated by European and American standards" but maintaining, in the game's own words, a higher launch cadence than any other site on Earth. The location is presented as the real Baikonur Cosmodrome at Tyuratam, Kazakhstan, still leased to the Russian Federation Space Agency and its Aerospace Defense Troops through 2050 in the game's own near-future timeline — a detail that mirrors the real, ongoing lease arrangement between Russia and Kazakhstan governing the site today. The flavor text accompanying the location goes further than almost any other entry in this Archive by naming real figures and real milestones directly — Chief Designer Sergei Korolev's negotiation of a spare R-7 ICBM to launch Sputnik-1 in 1957, and Yuri Gagarin's first orbital flight aboard Vostok-1 in 1961. It also describes Launch Pad 1, the actual site of both events, as remaining a major landmark of human spaceflight history and part of a still-massive complex of assembly hangars and launch pads capable of servicing practically every class of booster, even as Russia's military presence there gradually shifted toward domestic sites like Plesetsk and Vostochny. It is a rare case in this genre of Soviet- and Russian-coded settings where the in-game text is more accurate, and more respectful of the underlying history, than most of the fiction built around it.
Red Alert 3 — Krasna-45 as Orbital Lifeline
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008) folds a version of the cosmodrome into its Soviet campaign through the Krasna-45 launch facility, an abandoned site reactivated under General Krukov's orders to bring the Soviet orbital defense network back online after the opening Imperial invasion. The mission plays the location as a rescue and reclamation operation rather than a straightforward assault: the Soviet commander and Nikolai Moskvin free a recon team imprisoned there by Imperial forces before successfully launching the satellite, restoring a capability rather than destroying one. Even filtered through the series' habitual excess — the facility conceals an Imperial ambush staged inside circus tents — the underlying beat is consistent with the trope's general pattern: a cosmodrome in this genre is worth fighting over because it represents functioning capability, not decayed ruin.
What the Trope Gets Right
Of all the settings this Archive has catalogued, the cosmodrome is the one most directly tied to an undisputed and still-celebrated achievement: the Soviet Union built the first operational spaceport on Earth at Baikonur in 1955, launched Sputnik-1 from it in 1957, and put Yuri Gagarin into orbit from the same complex in 1961, years ahead of the American space program on every one of those milestones. Where most of the Archive's entries take something specific and stretch it into an eternal, menacing generality, the cosmodrome setting tends to preserve the achievement more faithfully than it distorts it — even hostile depictions, like the Black Ops assault on Baikonur, are staged as sabotage of something the fiction concedes is working exactly as designed, rather than as the exposure of a hidden failure. It is the rare instance in this catalogue where reaching for a real Soviet institution actually serves the institution's own reputation, rather than diminishing it.
Notable Appearances
| Title | Location | Framing |
|---|---|---|
| Call of Duty: Black Ops (2010) | Baikonur Cosmodrome, "Executive Order" | Sabotage of an active, functioning launch |
| Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies (2010) | Baikonur Cosmodrome, "Ascension" | Functioning facility overrun by a failed experiment |
| Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008) | Krasna-45 launch facility | Reclamation and successful relaunch of capability |
| Tom Clancy's EndWar (2008/2009) | Cosmodrome, DLC battlefield | Historically grounded, functioning institution |
Conclusion
The cosmodrome earns a place in this catalogue less for the frequency of its appearances than for the way it inverts the usual pattern. Everywhere else in this Archive, a Soviet or Russian setting is treated as more dangerous the more decayed it looks; the cosmodrome is dangerous, when it is dangerous at all, precisely because it is still working. That distinction matters, because it is the one setting in the medium's Russian shorthand built directly on top of an achievement no amount of later fiction has managed to reframe as failure — the first rocket, the first satellite, and the first man in space all left from the same stretch of Kazakh steppe, and the games that return to it, however violently, are still returning to the site of that record.