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 saying that the farm managers are not very interested in the space information. Moreover, there is a certain pessimism in their attitude toward it. Why? The main reason lies in the ineffectiveness of the existing mechanism for introducing what is new. The system operates in such a fashion that people are not interested in what is new, because, after its introduction, they receive a smaller wage. 20. The space program must be viewed as a locomotive which is pulling behind itself a long train of basic and applied sciences. If all the achievements we have brought back from space were introduced today, then there is no doubt that an enormous economic impact would be felt in many sectors of the national economy. 21. [Shcherban] Each new launch of a spacecraft, it is asserted, produces wounds in the ozone layer which do not heal for a long time. And if you consider the fact that we are launching hundreds of space facilities, then that very layer reminds me personally of a sieve. Does the chairman of the state commission have his deputy for ecology close at hand? And, in general, is any one determining the effect of the space launches on the environment? 22. [Kiyenko] The rockets which we use to place the Cosmos and Resurs satellites into orbit are ecologically clean. And they do no harm to the ozone layer. They discharge a smaller amount of combustion products than do the automobiles of an average-sized city. And, in general, it one can't that a rocket punches a hole in the ozone layer. No one has ever even recorded such phenomena above the cosmodromes. And, with regards to the deputy... During launches of space vehicles for the study of natural resources, I have close at hand specialists from the Priroda State Center, who, believe me, know what's what in ecology matters. 23. [Shcherban] As chairman of the state commission, you know better than anyone else what the bill is for spacecraft launches. Couldn't you cite a couple of figures from this document? 24. [Kiyenko] Resurs-F, when it completed its program, produced an economic impact of 20 million [rubles]. That exceeded the cost of the vehicle, the rocket, and the launch many times over. 25. [Shcherban] Many of our readers are convinced that the entire space armada circling our globe serves, to a large extent, the interests of the military-industrial complex. In the final analysis, majors and colonels aren't launched into space so they can observe from orbit how the winter sown crops have sprouted, are they? For what purpose, it is being asked, have we achieved the world's highest resolution with our cameras--down to 5 meters--which can be used to view the wheat crops in detail from space...
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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.