Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS translation reproduces a 12 April 1990 SELSKAYA ZHIZN interview with Yuriy Kiyenko, chairman of the Soviet State Commission for Cosmos and Resurs satellite launches. Kiyenko defends the economic value of remote-sensing satellites, citing findings on the Aral Sea, desertification in Kalmykia, and resource prospecting. He says the launches do no harm to the ozone layer and names the Northern Cosmodrome as the launch site. Asked about satellite fragments that people take for UFOs, he says Soviet equipment is designed so that any debris falls in unpopulated areas.
“Mineral Wells”1 page
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 ## Document 5 of 16 age. A hale man of few words. During the year, he spends many a day roaming the cosmodromes. The satellites he has launched have never fallen back to earth or exploded, and they have sent billions of pieces of information from orbit. He has written more than 100 scientific articles and is an Honored Scientist and Engineer. 4. [Shcherban] Yuriy Pavlovich, every now and then there are reports in the newspapers about the satellite launches. And behind all of them stands a mysterious figure--you. What kind of work does the state commission chairman do? 5. [Kiyenko] It is somewhat odd that I am of interest to you. I am neither a cosmonaut nor a general designer. I am a civilian. The state commission chairman coordinates and supervises the operations associated with the testing and use of space equipment. An enormous number of people participate in those operations. The information needed for making a decision about launching a space vehicle and for supporting the work during the flight converges at the chairman's desk. Accordingly, he alone bears all the responsibility for how a launch will go and for the safety of the people... 6. [Shcherban] It is only recently that we have begun to learn the truth about the launches of manned spacecraft. Along with the successes in that area, there have also been failures: people have died, and crews have returned from orbit with nothing... But there has never been any such information about the launches of the robot satellites. There has been total silence on that score. 7. [Kiyenko] It's no secret that work with space equipment is dangerous. Very complicated situations come up. But I have never been involved in a single instance in which someone has died or has received a serious injury. So if you are expecting "'sizzling'" facts, then, I'm afraid I'll disappoint you. Space robot systems--unlike a human, who has one head, one heart, and two hands--all have one, two or even three back-up systems. That is why the space robots are more reliable. Man is needed in space for testing new equipment and for conducting unique experiments. When all the bugs have been worked out, then the automated equipment successfully replaces man. Although, even I have had some emergency situations come up. I have had to postpone launches when I didn't received absolute assurance that systems would work efficiently or when flight programs needed to be adjusted. Once, we discovered one person missing among the evacuated participants in a launch. The launch had to be put on hold. We organized a search party for the missing person. He had been sleeping quite comfortably in a safe area the whole time. 8. [Shcherban] What's the result of delaying a launch for a minute?
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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. 7 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.