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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## Document 5 of 16 14. [Shcherban] I would love to share your optimism. But here among the people far from space a somewhat different opinion has formed regarding its development. It's no accident that demands have been voiced at the Congress of People's Deputies for a reduction in the allocations for space... There was no sausage or butter in the pre-space era, and there's still none. Even though more and more satellites are being launched. Might it not make sense to reconfigure them and to concentrate on solving the problems of today? I believe that people would vote for that with both hands. 15. [Kiyenko] Well, first of all, the launches of space vehicles are not increasing. Just the opposite. And that's not because we are becoming convinced of the flights' ineffectiveness. The reduction is happening because they are becoming more effective and are lasting longer... 16. Let's imagine for a just moment that we abandoned the use of satellites and that we plunked down those millions for the purchase of meat. We would reduce substantially the effectiveness of the operations for investigating the country's natural economic potential. At present, space-derived information forms the basis of operations involving the search for raw materials and the study and inventory of the country's forests. That information is important for the study of agricultural resources and seismic hazards, and for the analysis of the engineering and geological conditions in areas that have nuclear electric power plants... I could continue the list ad infinitum. We would lose much, much more than we would gain if we abandoned the space programs. 17. It's another matter that the data from space-derived information is underused. And that use, basically, only for the development of industry. Agriculture is receiving only a miserly portion of the space pie. And yet, information that is of value to agriculture is being passed on regularly to the agricultural industry. For example, a comprehensive study of natural resources was recently conducted in the Central Asian republics. In arid places, we found lands with good forage resources, and we mapped them out. 18. [Shcherban] Mapped them out? No matter how many kolkhoz and sovkhoz representatives I questioned at the local level about how they are using the materials of space surveys, they just shrugged their shoulders: they hadn't heard a thing about it. Most of them don't even know what it is. 19. [Kiyenko] Well, I don't know whom you talked to there... Is it really necessary to get the space-survey results to the farm managers? It's the land-use surveyors in the oblasts and the republics who should be familiar with them. But you are right in
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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.