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.
“Pacific Ocean”1 page
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 ## Document 7 of 16 knowledge and solid skills are the main requirement for holding conversations with outer space. An aspiring person next to wonderful equipment cannot help but grow...' 19. Incidentally, this is understood very well in the higher educational institutions and in the scientific research institutes, and they eagerly invite officers who have worked well in the tracking center. They have more than one research work to their credit. Officers Yu. Gorobchuk, V. Zyubin, and M. Chernov recently defended their candidate dissertations. 20. "'Is it difficult to be an officer in the SKKP?' I could not refrain from asking Minayev this banal question. 21. 'Speaking for myself, it is difficult,' he answered. 'Today, the situation here is more or less quiet, but it is not always this way. For example, one of our tasks is to track space objects in the descent sector--we get precise information on the point of impact, and we issue information about this. And what are the satellites like now? There are those with nuclear equipment. When can they be expected? Where will the fragments fall...?' 22. Vladimir Minayev and his colleagues had occasion to worry some in the spring. It all started on the 8 March holiday. Four new fragments appeared in space. The analysis and data processing group reported: These are parts of a satellite that was put into orbit by the American spacecraft 'Atlantis.' It would seem it was nothing to worry about, but the object was not a simple one, and it was launched in the interests of the Pentagon--for visual and electronic intelligence, and its weight was 17 tons. Apparently the Americans blew it up because of defects. A precise answer had to be given: Where will the parts fall? Will they burn up completely in the atmosphere. The specialists did not err in their calculations. The first fragment burned up in the thick layers of the atmosphere on 19 March 1,500 kilometers to the north of Midway Island in the Pacific Ocean. They explained that the rest of the fragments do not represent a danger. Of course, their attention did not slacken until all of the fragments 'died.' 23. 'There is also work with the manned spacecraft,' explains Colonel Kovsh. 'But we get involved only in an emergency situation. If an orbital station or a spacecraft is being guided, and close communication is being maintained with them, then here as the saying goes our job is on the sideline. But if a malfunction should occur, and the Mission Control Center 'loses' its envoys, then it cannot do without us...' 24. Grigoriy Kovsh showed TASS information appended to a file.
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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.