The space age has generated a profound uncertainty of experience between technology and utopianism. This essay makes a critical intervention in this uncertainty by examining a historically constructed tension between dwelling at and departing from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Attention to this tension that underwrote the Soviet colonial project of conquering the cosmos and the terrestrial environment exposes the utopian vision of space travel and the ontology of a deflating present as a dialectic that questions the space age as a state of soon-to-be-leaving Earth.

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