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.
“National Academy of Sciences”2 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## Document 1 of 3 there are many such craft. And our mouths are just watering--after all, we don't have anything like that! 57. In the next few years, one more remarkable project is supposed to be accomplished--the placement into space of a 2.5-meter space telescope which has been named the "'Space Telescope'" or "'Hubble Observatory.'" It is a unique instrument; as soon as it is placed into orbit, astronomers will see much farther than they can with any powerful ground-based telescope; but the main thing is, they will see in a different way, because the telescope has a completely different wavelength reception range (not only the visible band, but also the ultraviolet band of the spectrum), and, in addition, gigantic angular accuracies are characteristic of it, inasmuch as the atmosphere does not interfere and does not create scintillations. 58. But this instrument has become a victim of the Shuttle project. The fact is that, in the last decade, the American space program has contained an innate flaw--all the space projects have been tied to a reusable craft, the shuttle. This represented direct political interference (an example of command-and-administrative methods of leadership), the result of an unfortunate decision and the fact that the opinions of scientists and engineers were not taken into consideration. Now even the NASA administrators have found within themselves the courage to acknowledge the error (and what is more, they consider it to be history) and now, along with the reusable ship, they are developing (and re-establishing) a whole range of ordinary, single-use launchers. But the space telescope and its mechanical interfaces have been constructed in such a fashion that they are all tied only to the shuttle, and, therefore, it is difficult to say exactly when the telescope will be placed into space. I can only note that our American colleagues have been extremely perturbed by the existing situation. 59. Several other projects are also in a similar situation. For example, Galileo, which involves the flight to Jupiter and the release of a "'landing party'" into the planet's dense atmosphere. It is such a pity that the American specialists did not take advantage at the time of our suggestion that they order Soviet launch vehicles for their program. Now it is already too late, but, certainly, a year and a half to two years ago, it would have been possible to consider this. ## 60. [Correspondent] But why is it too late now? 61. [Sagdeyev] The reason is the very same one--the complicated mechanical interfaces which I spoke of in connection with the space telescope project, and, in the case of Galileo, very extensive changes are required, while the shuttle flights have already
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.