Tyuratam was a station on the main Moscow to Tashkent railway, located in modern Kazakhstan. It was the location of the Soviet Union's spaceport, known to the west as the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

It was this very launch site that Francis Gary Powers, in his U-2, was trying to locate by following railway lines within the Soviet Union. Up until he was shot down the CIA had systematically been tracking over the major rail networks of the Soviet Union in a bid to find the launch site.