In Kazakhstan the Flight Termination System is the ground. Much cheaper and has never failed.

Crashing in uninhabited desert isn't a feasible failure mode for the American program due to its location. The Roscosmos-owned depopulated area around Baikonur, however, is vastly larger than the parkland around Cape Canaveral launchpads.

There's a thousand miles of empty desert to the next settlement, never mind city. Kazakhstan is big (and unlike the US, its southernmost parts are not the nicest ones).

> unlike the US, its southernmost parts are not the nicest ones

Wait, what?

Due to the rotation of the Earth it's advantageous to have your rocket launch facility as close to the Equator as possible. For the US that means the southern end of Florida, and while there are plenty of big empty deserts in the US, the southern end of Florida is not one of them. OTOH there's convenient big empty desert at the southern end of Kazakhstan (which was the southern end of the USSR when they were picking a launch site).

(FWIW Baikonur is still quite a way north of the Equator. AIUI a joint ESA-Russia Soyuz launch pad is now being built at the ESA launch site in French Guiana, which should save them a chunk of fuel).

Why is a big empty desert better than a big empty ocean?

You can launch from the middle of the big empty desert, while you must launch from the edge of the ocean.

In other words, launches from Canaveral need systems to ensure that a wild rocket doesn't land in downtown Orlando, while presumably launches from Baikonur don't have this problem on the same level.

You can launch from the ocean, though with more limitations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Launch

It's a lot easier to recover pieces from a desert than from an ocean.

My first thought it maybe they triggered the explosion to prevent it - guess not.