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 the dynamics of circumlunar flight. 10. To perfect the landing on Earth from escape velocity, the specialists developed a clearcut, detailed procedure with two immersions. We had to learn how to use the astrotracker and sextant to select the angle of entry after the final correction. And the proper angle depends on the magnitude and direction of the retrothrust impulse. If the angle is too large, the vehicle may 'dig into'' the atmosphere; if it's too small, the vehicle can 'overshoot'' the atmosphere. The best version is an entry with a 'skip': you enter the atmosphere, exit it, and, after losing high velocity, enter again, all the while keeping in mind which angle of attack the vehicle must maintain to reach the designated touchdown point. The 'Manual Impulse Entry'' instrument flashed the number of impulses after covering the first segment. We also used it to figure out the distance to the designated touchdown point. The distance was then converted into an angle of attack. All those operations were perfected in the dynamic 'Volchok'' simulator. In the end, we learned to make a 'landing'' with a precision of within a kilometer. After passing examinations on the design of the vehicle and the flight program, the cosmonauts were ready for circumlunar flight. 11. The flight would be difficult, even in terms of just the living arrangements, because, unlike Soyuz, the L-1 did not have an orbital module, and two people would have to spend a week in the descent module. We had high hopes as we watched the last unmanned flight. But, when the nose shield was jettisoned, a command was also sent to jettison the parachute system. The ship hit the ground and was flattened. Curiously, some of the film that it was bringing back was intact. As a result, we were the first to get beautiful, extremely clear photographs of Earth from the Moon. 12. In December 1968, the Americans performed a circumlunar flight with Apollo 8, and our leaders were shaken: ''Do we need to do it now? General Designer Mishin nonetheless managed to perform one more test flight of the unmanned version. And again a failure. Problems with the flight configuration led to depressurization of the craft. I should add that all three launches of the N-1 booster rocket in the flight-design testing were unsuccessful. Soberly sizing up the situation, the government shut down the program for landing a man on the Moon. 13. Aleksey Arkhipovich, was our plan any different from that of the Americans? 14. Our lunar lander was similar to the American lander, and the flight plans, as envisioned even by Kondratyuk, were in no way different from theirs. The craft had to attain a circumlunar
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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.