Khrushchev's Pet Project
SMITH, NORMAN F.
Khrushchev's Pet Project The Kremlin and the Cosmos By Nicholas Daniloff Knopf. 288 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Norman F. Smith Former Assistant to the Director of Engineering and Development at...
...we cannot yet make known their names or publish their photographs," Khrushchev explained in 1960...
...In this regard, The Kremlin and the Cosmos reveals little new "inside information...
...Indeed, space exploration became, as Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin once put it, Khrushchev's pet subject...
...But Soviet scientists were skeptical about the value of manned flight (as were some of their American counterparts) and Khrushchev's successors decided to abandon the moon race and concentrate on unmanned scientific spacecraft...
...How far the USSR had progressed with design and construction of manned hardware at the time is not known...
...Initially, the Soviets failed to anticipate the political impact that Sputnik would have on the world in 1957...
...Nikita Khrushchev was quick to sense its propaganda value, however, and Russia's space accomplishments soon became his favorite topic for threats and bluster aimed at the U.S.—spurring this country to catch up faster than it otherwise might have...
...Today, however, lunar flights have difficulty competing with sports events for weekend television time, and many politicians are taking a hard look at our space budget...
...As an aerospace engineer, I cannot help but wonder how the performance of a program based on mass anonymity compares with that of one permitting individual recognition...
...In order to ensure the country's security, and the lives of these scientists, engineers, technicians...
...Not only does the Kremlin conceal the scope of its space activities from the world, but a high degree of secrecy exists within the program—between workers and supervisors, cosmonauts and designers, employes and their wives...
...If a new understanding does develop out of the joint effort in space, it could easily be the most important spin-off of all...
...Yet in the long run, he says, cautiously, the "consequent reduction of suspicions could deliver a few benefits which are, today, difficult to foresee precisely...
...realized that we were racing alone...
...Daniloff predicts that the growth of the U.S.-Soviet space cooperation we see beginning now will be "arduous and unspectacular...
...The wall of Soviet secrecy, with which Daniloff collides constantly, seems nothing short of childish...
...Forced to thread his way through endless propaganda and to patch together material from scattered sources, Daniloff can only give us a frustratingly on-again, off-again view of the moon race...
...In fact, the top people in the Soviet space effort generally have been introduced to the public only after they were dead...
...During the '60s, of course, the widespread belief that the USSR was competing with the U.S...
...Even now, the Soviet space program remains a puzzle with most of the pieces missing...
...Neither Khrushchev nor any authoritative Soviet official," he writes, "ever directly took up the Kennedy challenge" to reach the moon by 1970...
...Daniloff indicates that the Premier's support was responsible for many of Russia's early space feats, and that his enthusiasm for the program may have been among the factors leading to his downfall...
...Because of Russia's controlled press, compulsive government secrecy and then firm dedication to noncooperation in space, no one in the U.S...
...The USSR had the technological capacity for a manned lunar landing, as was later demonstrated by its spectacular unmanned spacecraft that returned with samples from the moon...
...to be the first to put a man on the moon was the principal justification for the haste and waste of the Apollo project...
...Reviewed by Norman F. Smith Former Assistant to the Director of Engineering and Development at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston Coming 15 years after Sputnik plunged us into the space age and three years after Neil Armstrong first stepped onto the lunar surface, the recently concluded Moscow summit agreement on space cooperation —including plans for a 1975 docking of Soviet and American spacecraft in orbit—signals a dramatic change in the space race...
...In this atmosphere Nicholas Daniloff, a UPI Washington correspondent who spent four years as a reporter in Moscow, provides a lucid —if necessarily fragmentary—account of Russia's venture into space that suggests the Soviets dropped out of the moon race as early as 1966...
...But I'm not holding my breath...
Vol. 55 • June 1972 • No. 13
