Rocket launch site located in Southern Russia, near Yasny in Russia’s Orenburg Oblast, just north of the border with Kazakhstan near the town of Dombarovsky. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the Soviet military used the site for its newly formed Missile Division and the deployment of ICBMs. The Russian government upgraded it in the mid-2000s so that it could launch commercial space payloads using the Dnepr-1 rocket. The first such launch occurred on 12 July 2006 and successfully placed the Genesis-Pathfinder-1 into circular Earth orbit. Since then, eight additional payloads have been successfully launched and deployed; the latest to date being a KOMPSAT-3 satellite in 2015.