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.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
to a large extent, they duplicate one another, although, unfortunately, not in everything. There are several instruments on Phobos 1 that are not on Phobos 2. Primarily, I am talking about the Terek instrument, whose tasking included investigation of the sun's x-ray radiation. It was developed by specialists from the USSR and the CzSSR. Now we are deprived of a lot of unique scientific information, and this is extremely disappointing. 24. [Correspondent] One cannot help remembering how successful the Vega mission was just two years ago, despite the fact that this was the first multipurpose project. Undoubtedly, the performance of such space projects is a very difficult matter in which nothing is trifling and it is too expensive to have to pay for errors. Obviously, the role of the scientists must increase. Is this not what you had in mind in your speech at the International Scientific Council on the Phobos project, which took place at the USSR Academy of Sciences' Space Research Institute in June of 1988, when you called for an end to the ''hegemony of the producer?'' 25. [Sagdeyev] I would say that everyone is familiar with the concept of the hegemony of the producer in our economy, on a personal basis, and all it takes, for example, is to go into any store. In actuality, this phenomenon is, of course, much more widespread and, unfortunately, those who work in cosmonautics also feel the effects of the faulty system which has come about in our economy. For example, the numerous--from the first to the sixteenth-- Venera-series craft appeared not at all because our scientists were reaching out toward Venus so very madly; rather, it was simply a matter of this: it is either Venus (in the extreme case, Mars) or nothing. And quite often, it was necessary to contend with the fact that there was no real competitiveness between the industrial enterprises which specialized in this area. In each specific field, monopolies emerged, and, as a result, the scientists had almost no choice. 26. Moreover, it was even necessary to put up with them banging their fists on the table at you. Unfortunately, this practice still persists, as was demonstrated by the recent events associated with the analysis of the situation on the Phobos 1 craft. Evidently, glasnost and democracy will come to the aerospace industry last. It seems to me that all too often, in general, people take refuge in "'secretiveness'" in order to make life easier for themselves. I attribute this primarily to those managers who lack adequate capabilities for conducting their own affairs in a professional (and--as a consequence--successful) manner. 27. [Correspondent] Nevertheless, one would very much like to believe that, in the end, glasnost and democracy will come to all the
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.