Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS translation, dated 10 October 1990, reproduces a KRASNAYA ZVEZDA article by Lieutenant Colonel A. Dokuchayev about the Soviet outer space monitoring system (SKKP). Officers at its tracking center describe cataloging more than 7,000 orbital objects and tracking the fragments of a satellite that re-entered the atmosphere. They also describe helping the Soyuz T-13 crew find the silent Salyut-7 station. The article says center data showed the downed South Korean Boeing-747 flight in 1983 was synchronized with a Ferret-D reconnaissance satellite.
“The Pentagon”3 pages
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 7. He showed a short chronicle of recent reports from abroad. 8. '16 July. Pakistan launched its first Earth satellite vehicle, weighing 50 kilograms, from Chinese territory. According to the announcement of the prime minister, this is 'an important event on the road to the technological modernization of Pakistan.' 9. ''1 August. A missile whose electronic components were undergoing testing in the air for the 'Star Wars' program went off course and was destroyed on a command from Earth. The destruction command came from the White Sands test range (state of New Mexico). 10. '4 August. A Delta-2 rocket was launched from the space center on Cape Canaveral. Its main objective--to put a Navstar system satellite into orbit--pursuant to a Pentagon program...' 11. ``Different, very different satellites are being put into orbit, and they simply are real dragons. Once outer space becomes more dangerous, then we must know everything,'' says Viktor Nikolskiy, 'or almost everything about each apparatus and object. These tasks surfaced as early as the beginning of the 1960's, and they were prompted by the placement of satellites into orbit that had a military purpose.' 12. Like every new program, the system for monitoring outer space was born as they say with birth pangs. The original provision of space object tracking was accomplished through information obtained by optical systems of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the Air Defense Troops, with the use of plotting boards and individual programs... But with the passage of time this became inadequate. Powerful radars of the missile attack warning and the antimissile defense systems were linked up in the tracking of objects. The streams of information were transformed into a real river that was full-flowing and rapid. The question arose as to the speedy and effective processing of information. And so in 1970 a space tracking center began to be created. N. Buslenko, G. Ryabov, and their colleagues performed a great service in this. 13. A kind of personal file is kept on each high-flying 'traveler''--it contains the satellite's coordinates, its capabilities, and its 'behavior'. A catalog is constructed from this kind of personal data. When the task arises to take a closer look at one or another space wanderer--for example, the U.S. reconnaissance satellite Ferret-D--the catalog helps find its location area quickly, and only then do the tracking complexes 'tell'' where it is located and give its characteristics. With what kind of accuracy? They explained it to me. Imagine that two soccer
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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. 5 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.