Science & Tech Quote by Nursultan Nazarbayev

Nazarbayev is doing something politicians do best: turning someone else’s technological achievement into a story of national arrival. The opening move, “in the past,” compresses decades of Cold War mythmaking into a simple before-and-after. Space used to belong to pulp novels and superpowers; now it’s sliding, however slightly, toward “ordinary people.” That phrase is the tell. It’s less a description of actual accessibility than a rhetorical claim about modernity: we are no longer provincial, no longer spectators.

The compliment, “you laid the foundation,” is strategically ambiguous. It credits an individual (or a team) while quietly positioning Kazakhstan as the indispensable stage. Nazarbayev led a country whose symbolic leverage in global spaceflight is outsized because Baikonur Cosmodrome sits on its soil, leased to Russia and woven into Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet identity. Praising “space tourism” lets him reframe that inheritance from Soviet relic to future-facing asset: not just missiles and geopolitics, but aspiration, commerce, and soft power.

The subtext is transactional. Space tourism is presented as a democratic miracle, but it’s really a luxury product, available to millionaires with the right connections. By calling those passengers “ordinary,” Nazarbayev borrows the moral shine of inclusivity while avoiding the messy realities of inequality and infrastructure. It’s a neat piece of rhetorical engineering: celebrate a frontier, brand the nation as part of it, and imply progress without promising redistribution.