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 Page 9 spheres of our life just the same. But, it is still not clear to me why, before recently, it was Venus or Mars that was selected as the research project? 28. [Sagdeyev] For each space project, with its own scientific or technical sparkle, it is necessary to develop an appropriate spacecraft. In order to do this, the designers, together with the scientists, create technical specifications that, each time, are new. But, in our case, the task consisted of trying to use an already existing 'machine' over and over again. We were simply lucky that, in its time, the craft of the Venera series was thought up and its first models developed by such a remarkable enthusiast as G. N. Babakin. One can only marvel at the longevity of these craft: after all, with a design developed on the basis of them at the end of the'60s for the flights to Mars (recall Mars-3 through -7)--with certain modifications, of course--we managed in the middle of the'80's to pull off such a complex, multipurpose project as Vega. 29. That is why I want to emphasize once again that competitiveness should be incorporated in the system from the very start, and then it's a matter of the consumer (in this case, the scientist), based on his own interests, selecting the best, the optimum version of the design effort. 30. [Correspondent] Then, will what is now being planned to be done during the Mars 94 project also be an example of such competitiveness? 31. [Sagdeyev] Everything depends on how perestroyka goes. In fact, there are still a lot of little nooks and crannies (quite a few) into which, for all practical purposes, it has not yet penetrated because of ''secretiveness.'' But, I am hoping all the same that, by 1994, we will develop a good project. And it is very important that, from the very beginning, the principles of scientific democracy and glasnost extend to all our international cooperation among scientists. In fact, we have managed to establish at the Space Research Institute quite a remarkable, informal scientific association which includes the laboratories of 15 countries, and, in certain projects being developed at this time, the number of participants is even greater. The main thing is for everyone to realize that each member of such international cooperation has a right to his own opinion. 32. And, in my opinion, it is quite unimportant that competing versions developed by two industrial enterprises for the Mars 94 project propose the use of different launch vehicles--either the Proton or the Energiya, i.e., the space probes will differ in the overall weight of the scientific package sent into space. The main thing is that, during the process of the preparation for this
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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.