Since 1965, when he was trained as the Soviet Union`s first space journalist, Yaroslav Golovanov has been struggling to tell his stories without censorship.
”It was very difficult for me to work because I knew much more than I was able to write,” he says. ”But Soviet journalism is journalism between the lines. If you could not say something directly, you could still write for clever readers.”
As he related in a recent visit to Chicago, Golovanov-generally regarded as the Soviet Union`s premier science writer-is now free to write what he wants. And he worries about the future of his nation`s space program as much as Americans worry about theirs.
Both enterprises have lost their sense of urgency, he fears, and their sense of direction. ”While NASA has only marginal support for an expensive space station,” he says, ”we Soviets are trying to drum up enthusiasm for a manned flight to Mars by 2010.”
In the meantime, both nations are stuck with their lookalike and immensely complicated space shuttles. ”We were 10 years behind the U.S. with the shuttle,” Golovanov says. The Soviet shuttle consists of a huge Energiya booster very similar to the old, reliable NASA Saturn V, and an orbiter called Buran (Siberian Snowstorm).
”We bought into the shuttle system because the Americans convinced us that was the way to go. Now, like the Americans, we`re not so sure.”
In general, the U.S. continues to have an edge in electronics, Golovanov concedes, ”which is why you continue to build satellites that live for a long, long time.
”On the other hand, since 1971 we`ve been trying to perfect our permanent space stations because we are pre-eminent from the aspect of biological and medical research in space.”
There`s not much point, Golovanov argues, in having astronauts continue to deliver spy satellites by hand when robots could do it easier, or in having cosmonauts continue to serve as guinea pigs in medical experiments or keep telling everyone how beautiful the Earth is from 210 miles up as they set longevity records in the MIR-2 station, which has been in orbit since 1986.
Status for sale
Moreover, in the Soviet Union, as Golovanov sees it, national prestige is being sold to the highest bidder.
”On Dec. 2, our orbiting space station Mir (”peace”) was manned by a crew that included a Japanese journalist-the world`s first journalist in space,” Golovanov notes, bitterly. ”When we Soviet journalists learned of the agreement-a $12 million deal between our government and Japan-we of course protested.”
Golovanov, 58, who had hoped to be first, was ruled out because of incipient diabetes. ”But several others in our group were pronounced absolutely healthy. And yet, it was a Japanese TV newsman (Toyohiro Akiyama)
who ultimately was first.”
The world watched in amazement recently as 48-year-old Akiyama joined cosmonauts Viktor Afanasyev and Musa Manarov atop a Soyuz rocket-a Japanese rising sun emblazoned on its sides-that blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome 1,600 miles southeast of Moscow.
The Soviets sold corporate logo space to nine Japanese sponsors, including a toothpaste company and a maker of sanitary napkins. Even the cosmonauts` T-shirts were fair game. Other sponsors, from the camera giant Minolta to a manufacturer of sing-along sound systems for use in bars and homes, painted their messages on the launch pad.
Akiyama spent only eight days in MIR-2, but the proceeds from his trip paid for Manarov and Afanasyev, who will be there for six months. Manarov holds the record as the man who has spent the longest period in space-he and Gherman Titov spent 366 days crammed into the house trailer-sized MIR, while physiologists studied their bodies and psychologists pried into their minds.
To Golovanov, such marketing with the Japanese means the Soviets no longer aspire to world leadership in space exploration, a goal the USSR has pursued since the days of Nikita Khrushchev. The Soviets have opted instead, he says, for money.
Commercialism began creeping into the Soviet space program in 1988 when the Russians invited American and European officials to witness the launch of Phobos I, one of two ill-fated Mars probes lost before they reached the red planet.
The Phobos launch vehicle bore the first signs of capitalism-its second stage carrying the corporate logos of two steel companies, Danieli in Italy and Voest-Alpine in Austria, which had paid to advertise. Such developments are a far cry from the secrecy and militaristic fervor that once characterized the Soviet space program.
Intentions, schedules, setbacks-let alone disasters-were never disclosed. Triumphs were ballyhooed as demonstrating the inevitable supremacy of the communist system, though the technical shortcomings of the Soviet space effort were plain to the rest of the world.
Enduring pride
Through it all, though, the Soviet people have viewed their nation`s space adventure with pride, avidly following every development, and erecting heroic monuments to valiant cosmonauts.
Few Soviets had more pride than Golovanov, a space buff since boyhood who earned a university degree as a rocket engineer and went into journalism to get closer to the designers and cosmonauts. As space correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda, the 22 million circulation national daily for Soviet youth, he diligently traveled to Baikonur for 10 years, covering every launch, knowing that only good news or no news would result.
Golovanov, his wife and their 3-year-old daughter recently returned to Moscow after spending six months in Chicago. His wife, Yevgenia Albats, a reporter for the Moscow News, participated in a journalism exchange program and worked at the Tribune. Golovanov collaborated with James Oberg, a Houston- based space engineer and leading U.S. authority on the Soviet space program, on an English edition of the latter`s three-volume biography of Sergei Korolev, founder of the Soviet space effort.
A member of the Soviet Authors Union since the 1960s, Golovanov has written 15 books-mostly about the history of science and Soviet space heroes. Most Americans don`t know that many Soviets have been yearning for space travel since publication of the writings of Jules Verne and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who in 1903 foretold multi-stage rockets fueled by liquid hydrogen that could carry man into the universe.
In Korolev, Golovanov says, were blended outstanding engineering and scientific instincts, a brilliant organizational mind and political savvy. For many years Korolev gave his American rivals fits, and when he died in 1966, he was sadly missed by his people.
In fact, according to Golovanov, the U.S.-Soviet space race, which has seen astronauts land on the moon and cosmonauts construct permanent habitats in Earth orbit, actually was a clever ploy by Korolev that led to a totally unexpected outcome.
”In 1957, our scientists hoped to make an impression during the International Geophysical Year,” Golovanov says. ”So on Oct. 4, we launched Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite.
”Our people were excited that we had beaten the Americans, but the story wasn`t big news in Russia and the frightened reaction from the West surprised us.”
Just a `tiny wanderer`
The Soviets` 20-inch, 184-pound ”tiny wanderer,” essentially just an aluminum ball that housed a radio beacon and a thermometer, circled the globe every 96 minutes, bleeping its tinny song for an astonished world as a preview of the future. American officials panicked. They had severely underestimated Soviet capabilities.
But, says Golovanov, Sputnik was never supposed to spook the world, only to show that Soviet rocket science was for real.
”Korolev was flying back to Moscow after launching the satellite,”
Golovanov says, ”and the pilot made him listen to the radio. Korolev was shocked by the uproar. Even Khrushchev was floored.
”You see, the big deal for our government was not Sputnik, but the R-7 rocket that had carried it aloft. That rocket was designed to carry a hydrogen bomb.
”Korolev had talked Khrushchev into letting him attach the Sputnik, since we were testing the rocket anyway. If it worked, we`d beat the Americans into space with a satellite. If not, then not.”
Capitalizing quickly on the furor, the Soviets a month later launched an impressive half-ton payload carrying the little dog Laika (Barker), which they were able to keep alive for 10 days until putting it to sleep before its oxygen ran out. That experiment showed that life could be sustained in weightlessness, at least for that long.
Nearly hysterical, American space experts rushed to put something up-a satellite that instantly became immortalized as ”Flopnik” when it died on the launch pad, rising only a few inches before falling back, blowing up and flipping its payload beacon to the tarmac where, like American hopes, it just lay there, beeping piteously.
America`s little Explorer satellites came four months after Sputnik I and did better, though they weighed only 30 pounds. But at least the race was on. On May 15, 1958, the Soviets launched Sputnik 3-a veritable monster weighing almost a ton and a half-containing a sophisticated geophysical observatory that measured space radiation and sent back data until 1960, when it was destroyed upon re-entry.
Next came the Soviets` Vostok (”east”) program. On April 12, 1961, the USSR sent the first man into space when Yuri Gagarin made a single Earth orbit in a Vostok re-entry capsule. After an hour and 48 minutes, Gagarin was ejected from Vostok and returned to Earth by parachute. He would be followed in a few years by more Soviet firsts: first spacewoman, Valentina Tereshkova
(1963), and the first space walker, Aleksei Leonov (1965).
By then the U.S was responding with suborbital flights by Alan Shepard and Gus Grissom and a trip of three orbits by John Glenn. Korolev`s little Sputnik adventure had kicked off the American campaign to send men to the moon and, though nobody knew it, Soviet ingenuity had peaked.
Slow, steady loses the race
Early on, the two sides began to engage in the kind of tortoise-and-hare behavior that came to typify both programs. The Russians took few chances and believed in slow, steady progress. They have lost only four cosmonauts, one to a fire on the ground, and three to a parachute malfunction during the re-entry of Soyuz 11 in 1971.
The Americans bounded into space with dazzling technical achievements, then often slumped into lethargy-as when national ambitions were so badly bruised by the 1986 Challenger disaster-and agonized over long-term goals.
Technical lessons learned in Gemini led to the Apollo project and by 1968, Americans were orbiting the moon as the Soviets were still trying to fine-tune their Soyuz rockets.
”We started thinking about sending a man to the moon after Kennedy announced his 10-year goal,” Golovanov says. ”But your Saturn V was much better than our N-1, which was all we had.”
Both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. had captured German rocket scientists at the end of World War II. But the Americans had Werner von Braun. ”If your German scientists were generals,” says Golovanov, grinning, ”ours were lieutenants.”
”The race heated up when the U.S. spaceships orbited the moon. By then we`d started a program of automatic satellites. We sent a robot to the moon to take soil samples and bring them back-two weeks before Apollo 11.
”But our Lunokhod (Moonwalker) robot could not make a soft landing. It crashed. That was basically our problem then: We could harness rocket power, but we couldn`t control descent.”
The sophistication of the Apollo lunar module was beyond the Soviets. Thus, when American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon and Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit, Golovanov says, the Russians felt ”almost the same as the Americans had felt when we launched the first satellite.”
Since then, the Lunokhod Lunar Rovers have explored the moon by remote control, but Soviet cosmonauts still have yet to leave low Earth orbit. Golovanov worries that they never will.
Money problems are pressing in both countries now, he notes, and there seems to be no sense of mission, except for dreams of a trip to Mars. As a result, the space race is fizzling.
That especially hit home in the Soviet Union when glasnost raised the lid off the government and showed it was broke. ”Our space budget was cut, and it will be cut down more and more,” predicts Golovanov glumly.
