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.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 Document 5 of 16 9. [Kiyenko] In such an extremely complicated matter, the slightest interruption leads to an unbalancing of the system. Which means that there is a lesser degree of probability that we can produce the needed results. A whole set of research operations must be performed to determine the launch time. The entire collective really gets 'thrown off' whenever there is any kind of delay during a launch. 10. [Shcherban] Every time spacecraft are launched, the specialists assert that it will facilitate the development of the national economy. What kind of return have your spacecraft given to the national economy? 11. [Kiyenko] It is difficult to state precise sums in rubles, since the application of space technology is multifaceted. Well, for example, to make a map or to study the ecological situation in a given region, an airplane can be used, or a satellite. The space-derived information will be 3-4 times cheaper than that derived by airplane. But how many millions is the recent discovery from orbit of the causes of the Aral Sea catastrophe worth? These days, the Ministry of Land Reclamation and Water Resources and the agricultural industry are rightly being named as the primary culprits in the drying up of the Aral. But it turns out that they are not the only ones at fault. In the middle reaches of the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya rivers, the earth's crust is sinking. And at the mouths of those rivers, it is rising. 12. The difference in elevation between the mouth and the middle reaches changes by 10-15 millimeters a year. Nature is building a dam naturally at a rate of 1.5 meters a century! Underground aquifers have enormous reserves of fresh and slightly mineralized water. If the Aral Sea today has 450 cubic kilometers of water, the underground geological lenses beneath the middle reaches of the rivers have accumulated something on the order of 20,000 cubic kilometers. This will help solve the region's ecological problem! It will means billions of rubles saved! 13. And what about satellite prospecting for oil, gas and coal? Drilling just one dry well means millions of rubles down the drain. And what about controlling desertification? It was established from orbit that, in Kalmykia, 40,000-45,000 hectares of land per year are becoming unusable because the land is being covered with sand, and the reason for that--overgrazing by cattle. And what about the number of underground water deposits that have been found? Satellites have identified hundreds of thousands of hectares of eroded soil. If it weren't for them and the measures taken thanks to them, you and I would have no bread at all...
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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.