Traveling across Kazakhstan

Another one of those wonderful postings from English Russia that gives you some idea how many vast, largely unknown landscapes there are on this Earth.

Image: not particularly vast, but I could not resist the heron.

Spaceport Baikonur, Kazakhstan

A collection of pictures of this key Russian-run installation from the Big Picture. As noted on the BP site,

When NASA's last scheduled Space Shuttle mission lands in June of 2010, the United States will not have the capability to get astronauts into space again until the scheduled launch of the new Orion spacecraft in 2015. Over those five years, the U.S. manned space program will be relying heavily on Russia and its Baikonur Cosmodrome facility in Kazakhstan.