Mission Misfire

Even as the U.S. and the Soviet Union step up preparations for July's orbital linkup of an Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft, many American officials have quietly been expressing their concern that Russian space skills may not be equal to the demands of that historic mission. Last week those doubts were dramatically reinforced. Only minutes after its launch, a Soyuz spacecraft with two cosmonauts on board made a forced landing some 1,000 miles downrange in the rugged 13,000-ft.-high Altai Mountains of western Siberia.

In a 15-line dispatch, Tass reported that the mission was aborted when an upper stage of the Vostok booster rocket began carrying Soyuz 18 off course; at that point, the rocket shut down automatically and the spacecraft was set free for return to earth. The two cosmonauts, Vasily Lazarev, 46, and Oleg Makarov, 41, seem to have escaped injury, but Western observers pointed out that if the upper-stage engine had fired a few seconds longer, the cosmonauts might well have come down in China.

In an attempt to reassure NASA, the Russians privately told visiting American space officials in Moscow that the rocket was an old model that had been "less diligently" checked out than usual. NASA's Deputy Administrator George Low, who negotiated the agreement with the Russians for this summer's joint flight, said the space agency had every confidence that "the problem experienced on this launch will be fully evaluated by Soviet officials and that the necessary corrective actions will be taken."

In private, NASA officials were less optimistic. Most agreed with Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, who said the flight only "reinforces my deep concern that [the joint mission] may be dangerous to American astronauts."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.