Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an interview with cosmonaut Maj. Gen. Aleksey Leonov from the Soviet journal Aviatsiya i Kosmonavtika. Leonov describes the Soviet manned lunar program, its L-1 and N-1 failures and crew training, and criticizes Soviet secrecy and economic policy. Asked whether Apollo 11 astronauts saw extraterrestrials, he says UFO watchers took a remark out of context, since "they" meant Earth.
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Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 Document 2 of 8 Page 1 Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Status: [STAT] Document Date: 01 Aug 90 Category: Report Type: JPRS Report Report Date: Report Number: JPRS-USP-90-005 UDC Number: Headline: Leonov Interviewed on Soviet Manned Lunar Program, Current Issues Source Line: 907Q0151 Moscow AVIATSIYA I KOSMONAVTIKA in Russian No 8, Aug 90 pp 44-45 Subslug: [Interview with Maj. Gen. Avn. Aleksey Arkhipovich Leonov, USSR Pilot-Cosmonaut, twice Hero of the Soviet Union: ''The Flight That Didn't Take Place: Maj. Gen. Avn. A. Leonov, USSR Pilot-Cosmonaut and Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Talks About the Soviet Lunar Program and Current Problems of the Space Program''; the remarks of interviewer Maj. I. Kuznetsov appear in bold] FULL TEXT OF ARTICLE: 1. [Interview with Maj. Gen. Avn. Aleksey Arkhipovich Leonov, USSR Pilot-Cosmonaut, twice Hero of the Soviet Union: ''The Flight That Didn't Take Place: Maj. Gen. Avn. A. Leonov, USSR Pilot-Cosmonaut and Twice Hero of the Soviet Union, Talks About the Soviet Lunar Program and Current Problems of the Space Program''; the remarks of interviewer Maj. I. Kuznetsov appear in bold] 2. [Text] Aleksey Arkhipovich, the readers of our journal are interested in the ''blank spaces'' in the history of the Soviet space program. One of them is our manned lunar program, in which you had the occasion to be a participant. Please share your recollections with us. 3. The Soviet manned lunar program called for two phases: first, a flight around the moon and, second, the landing of a man on the moon. The technical director of the program was Hero of Socialist Labor Vasiliy Pavlovich Mishin. 4. The first phase, in the mid-1960s--which is when the specialists at the Center actually became involved in the project--was seen as a reality: the Proton launch vehicle had already flown, and the Soyuz vehicle, which had received the designation L-1 in its lunar modification, was taking shape in metal. The second phase, however, was problematical. Still, we believed that it would come off. Sergey Pavlovich Korolev, even before the decision was made to implement the lunar program, had told us of the powerful N-1 booster and the L-3 vehicle, whose development his team was working on. At the time, we thought that the lunar program was designed to span many years. Plans Approved for Release 2/2010
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 6 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.