Soyuz rocket that will launch Tim Peake into space is rolled to launch pad at Baikonur space complex

A time lapse of the dawn unveiling of the Soyuz FG rocket that will blast Tim Peake, Timothy Kopra and Yuri Malenchenko to the International Space Station

Like much of the Soviet-built Baikonur space complex, launch pad No. 1 - or “Gagarin’s start” as it has been known since 1961 - is more about gritty functionality than space-age glamour.

A platform suspended over a vast pit scooped out the steppe, the superstructure bears the weathering of successive punishing winters, and the railway tracks cutting through the concrete surface are worn by dozens of heavy spacecraft and fuel tankers.

^{The Soyuz is scheduled to travel with the crew of Timothy Kopra of the U.S., Yuri Malenchenko of Russia and Timothy Peake of Britain to the International Space Station (ISS) on December 15 (Photo: REUTERS/Shamil Zhumatov)}

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Yet when Tim Peake, Timothy Kopra and Yuri Malenchenko blast into space from here on Tuesday, they will be following in the footsteps of some of the most iconic missions in the history of extra-planetary travel.

^{The Soyuz TMA-19M spacecraft is transported to a launch pad at the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (Photo: AFP/Getty)}
The launch point of both the world’s first satellite in 1957, and Yuri Gagarin, the first ever man in space, four years later, launch pad No 1 has been a favoured starting point for manned missions ever since.

^{Yuri Gagarin (Photo: RON CARDY / Rex Features)}
As a nearby plaque puts it, this as the place where “the genius of Soviet man began the daring conquest of space”.
More importantly for Major Peake and his crew mates, that history also means they are in safe hands.

With nearly six decades of experience, the technicians, the ground equipment, and the rocket itself are about as near as tried, tested, and reliable as the risky business of space travel gets.
Their fifty metre Soyuz FG rocket, which rolled out of its vast assembly hangar beneath a fittingly star-filled sky on Sunday morning, is a direct descendent of the early Vostok design that sent Gagarin into space more than half a century ago.

Their modern Soyuz-TMA-M capsule, perched in the tiny white-painted top section, is roomier, more comfortable, and far more advanced than Gagarin’s, but is also derived directly from Soviet-era design.
And in the unlikely event something does go wrong, the rocket includes an ingenious safety mechanism: a smaller rocket, mounted like an antenna on the nosecone, that can whip the crew’s capsule up and away from the Soyuz should anything go wrong.

^{The Soyuz FG Rocket which will carry British astronaut Tim Peake to the International Space Station, is positioned on the launch pad at Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan (Photo: PA)}
Happily, the system has only had to be used once, when an earlier Soyuz-U model rocket caught fire before take off in 1983.
Both cosmonauts on board, Vladimir Titov and Gennady Strekalov, landed four kilometres away, shaken but unhurt.