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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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1989 ## Document 1 of 3 Martian excursion vehicle and teach it to overcome obstacles and traverse the various geological and climatic zones of Mars. It is possible that, along its path, it will detect some signs of life or, at very least, traces of organisms which existed at one time. 39. [Correspondent] Do you consider the question ''Is there life on Mars?'' still open? 40. [Sagdeyev] Yes, it seems so to me. In any case, our duty is to use all of the flights to this planet to obtain a definitive answer. A negative answer will also be extraordinarily important. 41. Subsequently, in the course of a discussion on the Mars 94 project, our foreign colleagues proposed adding to the above-described scenario yet another launching of balloon probes and even advanced a very interesting idea for their design: a double envelope--one filled with helium and one with hot air--which would 'lie down to sleep'' at night and then, in the daytime, through the action of the solar rays, rise up once again and continue its own flight. 42. The next stage, also unmanned, involves the return of soil samples from the most interesting regions of Mars to Earth. If, by this time, equipment has been developed for travelling across the surface of Mars (and it requires not only an unusual design for a self-propelled vehicle, but also, in essence, actual artificial intelligence, which would control the Martian excursion vehicle), then we can count on such a vehicle to gather samples of material in the most diverse regions of the planet and deliver them to a rocket waiting to be dispatched to Earth. 43. This is one such scenario and sequence of operations which, in my opinion, can quite realistically be accomplished in this century. It is very important that the projects be international ones--then they will cost each of the participants a lot less. After all, we can no longer allow ourselves the luxury of thoughtless competition--who will get a launch off first--with the parallel expenditures of enormous sums. But, the main thing is for all of us--the project's participants--to feel that we are the ambassadors of a single, small and, unfortunately, rather fragile planet, the planet Earth. 44. [Correspondent] In the spring of 1988, you were in the USA, where you met with American scientists and politicians. Was the possibility of a joint preparation and flight to Mars discussed? If so, what was achieved in these talks? 45. [Sagdeyev] To date, our meetings with the American scientists are proceeding in this manner: we are exchanging ideas and, I would
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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.