Russian Space Progress

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31124, 29 July 1966, Page 13

Russian Space Progress

(N.Z.P A.-Reuter—Copyright) WASHINGTON, July 28. Dr. Wernher von Braun, the Germanborn engineer who heads the American Saturn moon rocket programme, was quoted today as saying that the Soviet Union appeared close to sending animals or men to the moon. Dr. von Braun said according to newspaper reports that his belief was based on recent statements by Soviet space officials and cosmonauts. “I am convinced the Russians are very close to being able to do one of two things —either go circumlunar or land a dog on the moon and bring him back,” Dr. von Braun said.

When referring to a “circumlunar” flight, Dr. von Braun meant that cosmonauts would be sent towards the moon, but instead of landing on the surface, their spaceship would be looped around the moon by the satellite’s gravitational force and sent back to earth. American space officials have long predicted that the Russians planned a manned circumlunar mission before sending men to the moon’s surface. American lunar plans do not call for such a mission. The cosmonaut, Vladimir Komarov, who piloted the three-man Voskhod I in October, 1964, said in an interview with Tass, the Soviet news agency, earlier this I month that Russia intended

to send “an unmanned exploring machine” to the moon and return it to earth in preparation for manned landings. “Next in the programme will be a similar try with a spaceship carrying a dog,” he said. “1 can state positively that the Soviet Union will not be beaten by the United States

in the race for a human to go to the moon,” he said in the interview. Dr. von Braun, who is the director of the American Space Agency’s Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama, said that “sometimes they (the Russians) tell us more than we expect, and we don’t pay very much attention to them.” He said, however, that the

Russians have yet to demonstrate a “three-stage capability” with a space-launching vehicle and that they apparently have not subjected a space vehicle to the re-entry conditions it would face on a return to earth from the moon. The Russians have not sent men into space since the Voskhod II mission on March 18, 1965, which included the world’s first walk in space. Since that time, the United States had launched eight manned Gemini flights. Many American space officials, including Dr. von Braun, predicted that Russia

would begin In March or April the testing in orbit of a moonship bearing five or six cosmonauts. Some sources believe that the three Proton payloads each weighing 27,0001 b which have been launched since last summer are part of the Russian man-on-the-moon programme. But Dr. Boris Konstantinov, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, announced after Proton 111 was launched this month that it was part of “continuing research under the programme of investigation of minutest ray particles.”