Exercise 1, page 106.0:00
Star City, Russia's space camp.0:05
It's the birthplace of spaceflight and the place where cosmonauts including Yuri Gagarin have trained since the 1960s.0:08
Until recently, it was a highly secret facility, and it is still not featured on any maps.0:15
And yet, after more than 40 years, Star City, or Zvyozhny Gorodok near Moscow, is still at the heart of the Russian space program.0:21
Surrounded by thick pine forest, Star City has been described as the perfect town with its clean, wide streets and friendly people.0:30
There are no traffic jams or billboards, and the town has its own school, shops, cinema, recreation facilities, and railway station.0:38
Almost 7,000 cosmonauts, training center personnel, and their families live here.0:47
In the town's central square, There is a huge statue of Yuri Gagarin where traditionally all cosmonauts place flowers before they fly.0:53
The reason for Star City's existence is the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, where cosmonauts undertake their years of intensive training.1:01
The training equipment at the center is very advanced.1:11
There are full-sized replicas of real spacecraft such as the Soyuz spacecraft, the Mir space station, and the ISS, International Space Station.1:15
There's a planetarium simulating the stars where the cosmonauts learn how to calculate their position while in space.1:25
There's also a giant pool with a replica of a part of the ISS submerged in it.1:32
Cosmonauts wear diving suits loaded with weights to learn how to spacewalk while working on the outside of a space station.1:37
Elsewhere, there's the centrifuge, which rotates the trainees in a tiny capsule to simulate G-force and weightlessness.1:44
This spins at 170 miles per hour, and riders are told not to open their mouths while moving because the pressure would break their jaw.1:52
This is a necessary part of training though.2:01
During a spacecraft launch, a cosmonaut can experience 4 times the force of gravity.2:03
It's extremely tough to be accepted for cosmonaut training, but some wealthy people pay around $30 million to have the chance to be a space tourist.2:09
These people still have to spend about 8 months training at the center though until they blast off.2:18
But if like most people you don't have tens of millions of dollars to spare, you can still visit the training center to be a cosmonaut for the day.2:23
You can take a tour of the center, try on a spacesuit, experience weightlessness, and practice docking a spacecraft in a simulator.2:31
There are exciting plans to make Star City a top tourist attraction in the near future.2:39
It's already an extraordinary place.2:46
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