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The Selling of the Soviet Space Program
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12775 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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3 / 1987 |
3,863 Words |
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Melinda Gibson
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A year ago, on February 20, 1986, the Soviets launched the core of a space station that will be the hub of their manned space activity for most of the next decade. The move did not surprise Westerners - or should not have, because the Soviets long forecast that they would orbit a new complex that would dwarf their previous efforts.
What has come as a shock to even seasoned Soviet watchers is that Moscow has hung a "for sale" sign not only on the Mir station but also on nearly every piece of civilian space hardware it has in orbit and on its principal launching facilities. The marketing push capitalizes blatantly on the West's launch crisis. At the same time, the selling of the Soviet space program can be traced to groundwork laid carefully two years ago by Soviet General Secretary Mikhali Gorbachev in his creation of newly commercial space agency, Glavkosmos.
And while Moscow labors to forge alliances through space research, the United States seems unable to do anything but alienate its technological allies, making Soviet offers more attractive.
Significant barriers to the use of Soviet space facilities and services outside the Eastern bloc remain, but many of those roadblocks are crumbling in the face of one central reality: For long-duration flight in outer space, the Soviets are the only game in town and will remain so into the early 1990s. Since it will be at least that long before the United States has any permanent manned presence in space, Moscow will have another decade to increase its lead in the knowledge of how to live and work in space and to amass Western technology to do the job better.
Mir means "peace"
It can also mean "world," which seems appropriate in view of the Soviets' determination to market the peaceful uses of their orbital laboratory worldwide. There are several takers.
The French, who have already flown with Soviet crews and have had a cooperative relationship with the Soviet Union in space since the early 1960s, will send an astronaut to Mir in 1988. The astronaut, either Jean-Loup Chretien or his backup Michel Tognini, will stay on the station for a month, taking a space walk and conducting experiments. (It will be the second time a Frenchman climbs aboard a Soviet station; Patrick Baudry flew earlier on the Salyut 7.)
It is all done at a minimal cost to the French, who will be bringing along, and leaving behind, sophisticated equipment to perform biological experiments and the workings of another space construction project. On the face of it, the project does not differ much from other joint scientific endeavors the Soviets have conducted with the West, but the melding of East and West space technologies may give birth to the kind of facilities that will spur more interest among sophisticated Western nations.
In October, the Soviets signed a historic agreement with the United Kingdom, which heretofore had not fielded a single space agency that could make such a deal. The umbrella agreement, between the Soviet Institute of Space Sciences (SISS) and the British National Space Center (BNSC), identified a number of "candidate areas" for cooperation
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