 The Berbera airport has a 4,140 m (13,582 ft) runway, one of the longest on the continent.The runway was built by the Soviet Union (USSR) in the mid-1970s in order to counter the United States' military presence in the region.It was rented by NASA at a cost of $40 million USD per year, and used as an emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle from 1980 until 1991, when the government of former President of Somalia Siad Barre collapsed.