Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center

The Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC — Tsentr Podgotovki Kosmonavtov, or TsPK), located in Star City (Zvyozdny Gorodok) approximately 25 kilometers northeast of Moscow in the Shchyolkovsky District, is Russia's primary facility for training cosmonauts for missions to the International Space Station and future space programs — and historically the training ground for all Soviet cosmonauts from Yuri Gagarin's 1961 flight through the end of the Soviet space program.

Founded in 1960 by order of the Soviet Ministry of Defense following the selection of the first cosmonaut detachment, GCTC is a closed military-scientific city that at its peak housed hundreds of cosmonauts, engineers, and their families in dedicated residential buildings, schools, and facilities surrounding the training campus. The center is named in honor of Yuri Gagarin, who trained there before his historic April 12, 1961 Vostok 1 flight — the first human spaceflight — and served as deputy director of the center until his death in a MiG-15 training accident in 1968.

GCTC's training infrastructure includes full-scale Soyuz spacecraft and ISS module simulators for mission procedure training, the Hydrolaboratory (hydrolab) — a 23-meter diameter, 12-meter deep neutral buoyancy pool equivalent to NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory — for spacewalk (EVA) procedure training, centrifuges for G-force physiological training including a 18-meter arm centrifuge capable of 30G, altitude decompression chambers for vacuum suit qualification, and virtual reality ISS systems for familiarization training.

GCTC has trained cosmonauts from over 30 countries and served as the mandatory training venue for international astronauts flying to ISS aboard Soyuz spacecraft — including NASA, ESA, JAXA, and CSA astronauts — due to Soyuz's role as the primary crew transport vehicle from 2011-2020 during the post-shuttle era. Following the introduction of SpaceX Crew Dragon in 2020, international participation at GCTC has significantly reduced, though Russian cosmonauts continue training for ISS rotations and China has sent taikonauts for joint training exchanges.