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
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1989 ## Document 1 of 3 appeared yet one more sad feature--reports to the leadership which embellished reality extremely skillfully. This created the semblance of well-being, at both the top and the bottom. And, as a result, entire scientific areas were neglected. Now they need to be developed vigorously. 51. But this problem has another, no less terrible aspect-- the young scientists and engineers who are working on various projects and witnesses their supervisors skillfully "'pulling the wool over people's eyes,'" are simply losing heart. Or what is worse--they themselves are beginning to work differently, and the same "'wool-pullers'" are emerging among them. And that is the most terrible thing! 52. [Correspondent] Nevertheless, one would like to believe in the enthusiasm and reasonable optimism of our youth and to count on their creative potential. And so, the research on the Phobos project is now in full swing. But, certainly, discussion of and, possibly, preparations for other, no less important space programs are going on at the same time. Which of them in our country and abroad would you take particular note of? 53. [Sagdeyev] In fact, right now, the Phobos project is, without a doubt, at the center of the international community's attention. As the interplanetary probes get closer to Mars, interest in it will only increase. 54. But one more remarkable scientific event is taking place in 1989--the American Voyager spacecraft, after its encounters with Jupiter and its satellites, Saturn's system and Uranus, will approach the planet Neptune. This is an example of unusual space longevity. We are all extremely delighted and, to be honest, terribly envious. But I want to emphasize that, in this instance, to an enormous degree, everything is being determined by the extremely high production efficiency with which this craft was developed. Indeed, its entire system, as a whole, and each individual small component--be it a microcircuit or a capacitor--needs to be able to operate for many years under extreme conditions (increased radiation, enormous temperature differentials and so on), without human intervention. 55. [Correspondent] Just how long has this space ''Methuselah'' been functioning? 56. [Sagdeyev] It was launched in 1978, so it has already been in flight for more than 10 years. But even this is not a record. Sometimes, as a joke, we are sent invitations to a banquet for the occasion of, for example, the 15th anniversary of Pioneer 6's continuous operation. That craft is a predecessor of Voyager; and
Not linked to a story yet.
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.