Star City is a purpose-built space town located near Moscow. Called Zvezdny Gorodok in Russian, it was set up in 1960 to house a training base for cosmonauts. Manned space flight pioneer Gagarin was trained here, and it is now known as the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre. It has similar facilities to NASA's Johnson Space Center, including flight simulators, a centrifuge and a water tank for EVA training. There are also full-size mock-ups of the Mir space station modules.
