Two excess launch sites will be preserved at Baikonur, including the Gagarinsky Start

The so-called “Gagarinsky Start” is the site number 1 (launcher number 5), the oldest launch facility at the Baikonur cosmodrome. From here, on April 12, 1961, the Vostok spacecraft was launched with cosmonaut Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin on board, the world's first man in space.

The site was actively used in the USSR, and now Roscosmos is using it to launch manned Soyuz spacecraft and Progress unmanned cargo spacecraft to the ISS.
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But a situation has arisen that in order to continue operating the site, it is necessary to modernize it to launch Soyuz-2 missiles, Izvestia writes . But it is 1) too expensive; 2) it is not necessary at all, because the platform 31 has already passed a similar modernization, but it is enough for the current launch volumes. Duplication of launch sites is an outdated Soviet tradition, which can be abandoned in order to increase profitability.

Therefore, soon "Gagarinsky start" will be decommissioned.

“For the existing scope of work, one site will be enough. Therefore, there is no need to modernize and maintain the second complex. Duplication of launchers is a Soviet tradition. This guarantees the launch even if one of the installations gets damaged in an accident, ”a source in Izvestia, familiar with the situation, said. “The launch complex pays for itself only if it produces at least six starts per year, that is, 12 starts of the Soyuz and 12 starts of the Proton-M are required to pay back the ground infrastructure of Baikonur.”

Under current conditions, it is impossible to count on 12 launches of the Soyuz and 12 launches of the Proton-M during the year. In 2017, Russia made eight launches of Soyuz missiles and four Proton-M missiles from Baikonur. In 2018, two Soyuz and one Proton started.

Experts note that part of Soyuz is now starting from the Vostochny cosmodrome, and the commercial appeal of the Protons has fallen after a number of accidents in recent years, so now you can only count on two or three commercial launches a year.

The launch site closure is provided by the list of measures to optimize the number of employees of the branch of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Center for the Operation of Ground-Based Space Infrastructure Facilities (TsENKI) - the Yuzhny Space Center. The document includes items on the transfer of PU-5 (“Gagarinsky”) and PU-24 into conservation mode (Proton launch complex at site 81).