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.
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## Document 1 of 3 say, working out what are still just speculative scenarios. There is enormous interest on both sides (by the way, it's in Europe also). But the matter of an agreement is already being touched upon by the highest leaders of both countries. You know that M. S. Gorbachev, in his own speeches, has several times dwelt specially on the subject of joint Mars research. Of course, his interest inspires us. But that the same kind of enthusiasm needs to be displayed by the American administration. It had no time just then, for as you know, the election campaign was going on in the United States, but we are hoping that the new administration will regard these space projects with greater interest. 46. Yet, all the same, after the Moscow meeting, some changes had begun to show in the top levels. For example, we were given the opportunity to discuss officially the approaches to this problem (I am talking about the flight to Mars) with NASA administrators. For the time being, we are exchanging views on the unmanned scenarios of the Soviet flight to Mars, with an eye to starting up, sometime in the future, a discussion on joint missions. 47. [Correspondent] As is well known, the cost of both multipurpose space projects--Vega and Phobos--is quite high. Errors and malfunctions in the program can cost dearly. Would it not help here to have mathematical modeling of the planned experiments? 48. [Sagdeyev] In any field of science, not just in cosmonautics, mathematical modeling is now becoming an imperative and a necessity. That is how it was during the Vega project: we attempted to model a large number of phenomena and processes long in advance of the launch of the space vehicles. The very same thing occurred during the preparations for the Phobos project as well. Thus, all the ballistics were constructed on the basis of mathematical modeling; the same can also be said about many other experiments. And the farther we go, the more we need to resort to mathematical modeling. Therefore, we are counting very much on the appearance of the supercomputers. For us, they are not prestigious toys, but rather, primarily, instruments with which it is possible to carry out a considerable portion of the operations. Of course, this does not replace actual physical modeling, but, it assists it to an enormous degree. And who knows, it is possible that it will replace it in the future! Unfortunately, for the time being, we can not get domestic supercomputers. ## 49. [Correspondent] What's the reason for that? 50. [Sagdeyev] During the notorious stagnant years, when the progress of our entire society was slowed down, including the development of many important areas in science as well, there
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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.