A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

When TIME Correspondent Dick Thompson arrived in Moscow to report this week's cover story, he told Soviet space officials that he was looking for "something special." How about an interview with the cosmonauts on board the Mir space station? he inquired. The request took the Soviets by surprise, and the immediate answer was nyet: interviews with cosmonauts must be arranged well in advance and not on an exclusive basis. Besides, Thompson was told, the cosmonauts hate shaving and making all the other preparations required before meeting the press. "My pen doesn't take pictures," Thompson replied; all he wanted was a brief chat. In the end, and in the new spirit of glasnost, Thompson was granted rare access to the Soviet Flight Control Center in Kaliningrad. There, through an interpreter, he communicated with the orbiting cosmonauts during a brief period in which they were in contact with earth. The clarity of the transmission was astonishing, Thompson reports. "There was no static."

This week's story not only reflects Thompson's unusual interview but also offers glimpses of the inner workings of the Soviet space program. The story, by Staff Writer Michael Lemonick, is accompanied by photographs obtained by Picture Editor Arnold Drapkin through a special arrangement with TASS. They include a shot taken inside the Mir space station and other photos that have never been published outside the Soviet bloc.

Thompson has covered a variety of scientific, medical and space-related subjects since joining TIME's San Francisco bureau in 1983. Between that assignment and his current beat in Washington, he spent a year at M.I.T. as a Bush fellow in science journalism. His work on this week's story began this summer in Hawaii at an international space conference. It was in that inspirational environment that Thompson first interviewed Roald Sagdeyev, director of the Soviet Space Research Institute, who helped smooth the way for his trip to Moscow. "We'd watch waves outside our restaurant window, and that would lead to thoughts about plasma physics." The two hit it off so well that Sagdeyev agreed to visit a restaurant that Thompson co-owns in upstate New York. Alas, the rendezvous never came off: "I was pre-empted by Cornell Planetary Scientist Carl Sagan, who arranged an elegant Japanese dinner in Sagdeyev's honor."