Moscow's Program Takes Off

By Joseph Wisnovsky.

With the U.S. space program grounded indefinitely by the Challenger tragedy, the Soviet Union demonstrated once again last week that it is strongly forging ahead in space exploration. From the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Central Asia, the Soviets launched the first in a projected series of supply missions to their new manned space station called Mir (Peace). The unmanned cargo vessel Progress 25, boosted into orbit by a workhorse Proton rocket booster, hooked up on Friday with Mir, bringing food, fuel, water and other supplies to Cosmonauts Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyev, whose own Soyuz T-15 spacecraft docked with the orbiting space station on March 15.

To frustrated proponents of an expanded U.S. space effort, the latest Soviet achievements provoked an old rallying cry. "We've been Sputniked again," exclaimed Sandra Adamson, a director of the L5 Society, an organization formed to promote an all-out American effort to colonize and commercialize outer space. Adamson's reference was to the 1957 Soviet satellite launch, which galvanized the U.S. into the effort that culminated in the 1969 manned moon landing.

Such concern is overdrawn. Despite the Challenger calamity, American experts say, in many respects the U.S. space program is still ahead of its Soviet counterpart. Nonetheless, Moscow has racked up a number of major achievements in space over the past 2 1/2 years. Among them: a record 237-day manned flight by three cosmonauts aboard the Salyut 7 space station, a daring repair mission to restart that station after a near total power failure, and a highly sophisticated radar mapping of Venus by two robot Venera probes. Earlier this month the Soviets dazzled the international scientific community with their Vega 1 and Vega 2 inspections of Halley's comet. Each Vega flyby was preceded by a swing past Venus to drop an instrument-laden balloon into the planet's dense atmosphere.

Then came Mir. On March 13, the Soviets sent veteran Cosmonauts Kizim, 44, and Solovyev, 39, aloft on Soyuz T-15 to activate the space platform, which had been launched into a slightly elliptical 210-mile-high orbit three weeks earlier.* The subsequent rendezvous marked a milestone: the establishment of what the Soviets have heralded as the first permanently manned space station. According to current estimates, the first comparable U.S. station will not be operational before 1994.

As usual, the secretive Soviets have released little information on the exact specifications of the Mir station or on their long-range plans for its operation. Some scraps of information, however, are available. Mir, which measures 56 ft. by 13 ft., is 16 ft. longer than the Salyut 7 but only slightly wider. Since the new space station is not intended to house bulky experimental gear, it has much more living space inside. Crew members have separate "cabins," or cubicles, each equipped with a folding chair, a desk, a mirror and a sleeping bag. The common area of the space station's living unit features a dining table, a buffet built into a nearby bulkhead, and exercise equipment for the crew. The station is fitted with a large number of portholes, providing views from all four sides of Mir. One oversize porthole has been installed in the floor for viewing the earth's surface.

Above the living area is the ship's control and work area, containing the main console from which the cosmonauts will monitor computer-controlled dockings, relying on floodlights and remote-TV cameras mounted outside the ship. Above the work area is a cylindrical docking unit with four "module ports" around its circumference and a fifth at the end (see diagram). Both manned and unmanned spacecraft will dock in the end port and then will be shifted to the module ports by an external arm. A sixth docking port is located at the opposite end of the space station and is intended to receive cargo.

Mir has much larger solar-panel "wings" than those on Salyut 7: 800 sq. ft. vs. 440 sq. ft. The distinctive appearance of the station has already moved Soviet Flight Commander Kizim to a flight of poetic fancy. "As we came close," he said in a TV broadcast, "it looked like a white-winged seagull, soaring above the world."

According to James Oberg, an engineer for a NASA contractor and an expert on the Soviet space program, the next step in the assembly of the new station may be to switch a laboratory module known as Cosmos 1686 from the aging Salyut 7 over to Mir. Currently, the two major Soviet spacecraft are in virtually identical orbits, with Mir several thousand miles ahead of

Salyut 7 and a few miles closer to earth. In coming weeks, says Oberg, Mir will get farther and farther ahead and eventually come up behind its rival around mid-April for the linkup.

Before then, Oberg believes, there is a good chance that another team of two or three Soviet cosmonauts will visit Salyut 7 and transfer reusable material into the laboratory module. The next spacemen "could go up any day now," he says. Oberg also expects that a second unmanned laboratory may be launched in the next week or two to attach to Mir. Thus, he sums up, "we're talking about a Mir, a new module on it, and the Soyuz T-15 at the back end. Then the old Salyut 7, the module hooked up to that, and another Soyuz with a crew. That's a real constellation."

Even more grandiose Soviet plans appear to be just over the horizon. There are indications that Moscow might soon launch its own version of the space shuttle program, ferrying crews and supplies to Mir and eventually bringing back industrial and biological products manufactured in space. Planning is also reportedly well under way for a Soviet-led international project to send two unmanned probes skimming past the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos in 1988. Roald Sagdeyev, director of the Soviet Institute of Space Research, has even entertained the possibility of a joint U.S.-Soviet manned landing on Mars.

Meanwhile, the Soviet leadership in Moscow is clearly enjoying the acclaim generated by the country's space triumphs. Last week the scientists in charge of the just completed Vega missions were summoned to the Kremlin for congratulations by Mikhail Gorbachev. The Communist Party General Secretary merely echoed the words of many Western scientists when he called the space efforts a "brilliant achievement of Soviet science and engineering" and a "convincing example of fruitful international cooperation in the peaceful exploration of outer space."

FOOTNOTE: *Both Kizim and Solovyev took part in the record-breaking Salyut 7 flight between Feb. 8 and Oct. 2, 1984.

With reporting by Michael Duffy/Washington and James O. Jackson/Moscow