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The Soviet drive into space is taking place while American space efforts are all but moribund. The U.S. space program has been virtually closed down since the space shuttle Challenger exploded in midair 73 seconds after lift-off in January 1986, killing all seven astronauts aboard, including Teacher Christa McAuliffe. The tragedy was more than a setback for NASA. It exposed the agency as an unwieldy, indecisive bureaucracy unsure of its direction and increasingly beset by the demands of the military and the Reagan White House (see following story).
NASA could handle awesomely complex missions like the Apollo landing on the moon in 1969 as long as it had plenty of money and control. But it has never established a long-range vision of the U.S. role in space. After its budget was cut in the early 1970s, the agency promised far more than it could finally deliver with the shuttle program. Even if launches resume on schedule, the orbiter Discovery will not fly until June 1988.
Meanwhile the Soviets are moving ahead. Next July the ambitious twin Phobos probes should be on their way to explore Mars and its moons. It is a mission worthy of Jules Verne. Harold Masursky, an astrogeologist who worked on the U.S. Viking missions to Mars, says the concept is "so damn complicated, it's just hair-raising." The Soviets plan to follow up on Phobos in 1992 by lofting another spacecraft, which will analyze Martian soil. Later in the decade, they want to use an unmanned probe to bring pieces of the planet back to earth, and have boldly suggested that the mission be jointly undertaken with the U.S.
But complex scientific missions are only part of the Soviets' push to dominate space. They are aggressively marketing their workhorse Proton boosters as a low-cost alternative to the European Space Agency's Ariane, China's Long March and, eventually, private U.S. rockets for launching commercial satellites. The Soviets are offering to sell high-resolution satellite photos of earth that could be used for mapping and assessment of agricultural and mineral resources. They plan to continue occupying Mir, which has been in orbit since February 1986. The space station has already been outfitted with an astronomical observatory module named Kvant. Additional modules are planned for materials processing, earth observation and biomedical research.
The Soviet space program had several notable early successes, including Sputnik 1, the first pictures from the dark side of the moon in 1959 and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin in 1961. But its planetary-science program did not really take off until shortly after the appointment in 1973 of a 40- year-old scientist named Roald Z. Sagdeyev as head of IKI. From the outset, Sagdeyev started to shake things up. He took physicists out of their labs and put them on production lines to watch their experiments being built. Says Georgi Managadze, chief of IKI's active space experiments lab: "Sagdeyev follows every stage of manufacturing and testing."