Documents / FOIA release
This CIA-held JPRS report (JPRS-USP-89-007) is an English translation of an interview with academician Roald Sagdeyev. The interview ran in the Soviet magazine PRIRODA in January 1989. Sagdeyev talks about space research achievements, the Interbol project, and the Phobos mission to Mars, including the loss of contact with Phobos 1 in September 1988. He also covers competing designs for Mars 94, manned flight to Mars and democratizing Soviet science. He mentions UFOs only once, recalling a Gosplan lecture where every audience question was about flying saucers.
“Cooper”5 pages
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## Document 1 of 3 project, the element of competitiveness emerge immediately. Indeed, each of the groups, in proposing its own design version for the flight to Mars, is now trying to find the most interesting features of its own scenario in order to show that its design is the one which will enable science to get what it wants, and to the fullest extent. 33. [Correspondent] There are differing schools of thought on manned flights, particularly to Mars. Do you count yourself among the proponents of such flights, or are you for the unmanned probes? 34. [Sagdeyev] I consider manned flight a very important measure. It cannot be based only on the need to solve certain scien ific problems. It also has a very important political aspect, inasmuch as it is its own kind of counterweight to purely military projects such as, for example, SDI. But, at the same time, it must be clearly understood that this is also still a very complex project. It is clear that no one is ready to do it today: the equipment needs to be developed, and more information must be obtained about Mars itself and about what we call its "'engineering model." I am talking about the collection and assembly of the data which must be available to the engineers and designers in order to develop the unique equipment, put it into a Martian orbit, and then perform the flight and landing through the planet's atmosphere under little-known conditions. 35. Now in this first stage, as a precursor to manned flight, there absolutely must be unmanned missions by robot vehicles. They need to be planned as the first links in a long chain of flights. In fact, even today, we need to think about a general line of research and not simply ''snatch out'' some individual flights. 36. [Correspondent] But does such a general line exist at the present time? And can you say something about the difference between the strategy of the space program in our country and that in the West? 37. [Sagdeyev] I can freely assert that we have such a line of research. Thanks to glasnost, which made its way into our space science very swiftly, we simply were prepared for this, understanding that it is impossible to work otherwise. We have been able to express and approve our own point of view on the development of space research (of course, this point of view is not something hard and fast--it is continuously developing, and we are taking into consideration our partners' suggestions as well). This point of view has now become, I would say, a generally accepted concept. 38. Good orbital craft must first be developed, then descent modules must be landed on the surface of Mars, and then the landing craft must be made to move about the planet's surface, i.e., turn it into a
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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. 21 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.