'Big Step To Planets'

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29903, 17 August 1962, Page 11

'Big Step To Planets'

(N.Z.P.A. -Reuter— Copyright) MOSCOW, August 15. A leading Soviet astronomer said today that the latest orbital flights had been a big step towards building a space station from which spaceships could be sent to the planets.

Professor Avenir Yakovkin. of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, told Tass that the Nikolayev-Popovich flight had been very valuable for the practical solution of the problem of bringing two spacecraft together in orbit.

This would be an important step in building the orbiting space station which the astronomer Tsiolkovsky (who died in 1935) had said would be the only means of sending spacecraft to the planets and back. (Western space experts havq speculated that Soviet rockets might be powerful enough for the Russians to send a manned spaceship to the moon and back without using an orbiting space station like that in the American Apollo project.) Radios in Spaceships

The Tass scientific commentator said that the cosmonauts' two-way radio contacts in space were of great importance for future cosmonauts having ‘‘to manoeuvre, to pass from one orbit to another, to gather in groups, to assemble in space various structures.” The spaceships carried several radio sets, including receivers with loudspeakers on which the astronauts could listen to the broadcasting stations of the whole world. Tass reported. Other sets were used for communicating with the ground, and for conversations between the two spacemen and each capsule was fitted with a magnetic recorder which started automatically whenever the men began to speak. The microphones used in the spaceships were “noiseresisting" which enabled the spacemen to maintain communication with the earth even when the spaceships were being put into orbit. Food Problem

In Moscow, Mr V. Semenenko. a scientific worker at the Russian Academy of Sciences, wrote about the problem of supplying food for cosmonauts on long trips in today’s “Sovetskaya Rossia." the British United Press reported. He said he believed that green plants on board a spaceship, given inexhaustible supplies of solar light, “will made it possible to create in miniature a constant rotation of terrestrial substances

whose amount will remain unchanged.

“The establishment in the space ship's cabinet of a system, based on the complete biological rotation of substances, no matter how fantastic it might seem now. k quite realistic," he said In Blacksburg. Virginia, Dr. Werner von Braun said last night that the orbits of the United States astronauts. Colonel John Glenn and Lieu-tenant-Commander Malcolm Scott Carpenter, eould be compared with the latest Soviet space feat. The rocket expert said the Glenn and Carpenter orbits were so much alike that if they had been launched in the same time period they could have also been in close relation to each other.

Dr. von Braun said though the Soviet achievement was impressive, “it does not look like the Russians used any new equipment. I don’t think there was a technical breakthrough but it was impressive from the standpoint of the whole operation.” “Wealth of Data” In Cape Canaveral a United States space official said the Soviet feat undoubtedly provided a wealth of data on man's reaction to space flight and expressed hope that Soviet scientists would share it with the world.

The official, a space medicine expert, commented that the nearly four days spent aloft by Major Nikolayev demonstrated that weightlessness apparently would cause no difficulty on relatively short space trips such as those planned to the moon.

He said he hoped medical information from the flights would be published by the Russians. “We would like to compare their reactions to those of John Glenn and Scott Carpenter,” he said. “The storehouse of knowledge about the effect of space flight on man is just beginning to fill. The Russians have added a great deal in the last few days."