Detailed Russian Space Plans Described

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30828, 13 August 1965, Page 11

Detailed Russian Space Plans Described

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

MOSCOW, August 12.

Soviet spacemen planned a manned trip around the moon before trying a lunar landing, a Soviet space scientist said yesterday.

Mr Mar Bobrov, of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, said Russia’s first manned flight to the planets would aim for Mars. “The conditions there are closer to those on earth than the conditions on Venus,” he said.

Mr Bobrov, speaking on Moscow Radio gave one of the most detailed agendas for space flight ever issued in Moscow. The cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, speaking on the same programme, predicted

future flights “will last weeks, months and even years.” He said Russia planned to “assemble orbital space stations.” It was planned to rotate the crews of those stations in orbit. Mr Bobrov said the first unmanned flights around the moon, to prepare for a manned landing, would come soon, but he gave no specific date. “In the near future we will face the task of circling the moon first without people,"

Mr Bobrov said. “Then we will circle it with people. Then there will be a landing on the moon’s surface, first with an automatic station, and then with apparatus together

with spacemen. After that will come flights to other planets. The broadcast marked the third anniversary of the “first group flight in history,” a simultaneous orbital flight in two spaceships by the cosmonauts Andrian Nikolayev and Pavel Popovich.