Russian Runaround

What burns Dr. Fred Whipple, head of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Cambridge, is that the U.S. shows Russian scientists its equipment for computing satellite orbits, while the Russians do not reciprocate. Dr. Whipple has just returned from two scientific conferences in Russia, where he got the "runaround" when he asked to see Russian equipment. "We were not shown," he said last week, "any of the satellite computing equipment or centers, in spite of great efforts and many requests to see them. We saw none of the installations except the moon-watch program, which is copied from ours at the Smithsonian Observatory."

Whipple does not know why the Russians were so secretive. It might be that their computing centers are part of a military program, but he has no evidence of this. Russian scientists did not explain. Several of them, embarrassed, claimed that the Soviet Union has no satellite computing center.

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