July 1999 SPECTRUM, on ISS

The US-Russian Space Relationship: Symbolism At Any Cost?
July 1999 SPECTRUM (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers)
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/spectrum/jul99/features/mir.html


TWO SPACE STATIONS, ONE OLD, ONE NEW, CIRCLE THE EARTH, in orbits deliberately kept as far apart as possible. But the ties that bind the two, Russia's Mir and the multinational International Space Station, which is primarily funded by the United States, are becoming ever more distressingly tangled.

The biggest and most obvious problems have occurred in the station's power and communications systems. A close look at how they were solved, from the component to the system level, reveals how efforts to preserve the unprecedented U.S.-Russian space partnership have engendered equally unprecedented costs, repeated last-minute revisions, and a startling lack of accountability on both sides.

The cast of characters includes the components of the International Space Station (ISS) currently in space or planned for the near future:
---Zarya (Russian for Dawn), the 20-ton Russian-built but U.S-financed component of the International Space Station, launched on a Russian rocket 20 November 1998. Also called FGB (for functional cargo block), it is powered by solar arrays and batteries and provides initial control and propulsion for the U.S. node module. The Russian-built Service Module, once launched, will be mated to Zarya and then take over its functions for the lifetime of the ISS. Zarya will then be demoted to serve as storage space and an interconnect structure.
---Unity, a U.S. module known as a node, with six attachment ports (one at either end, four around its waist), to which modules launched in the future will be connected. It was carried into space 4 December 1998, aboard the STS-88 Shuttle mission.
---The Service Module, recently re-named Zvezda (Russian for Star). This 20-ton centerpiece of the ISS will be launched at the earliest in November 1999. A modified Mir space station module, it is the first Russia-funded component of the ISS and is now almost two years behind in delivery. Its job is to provide long-term life support and control and propulsion functions.
---And, not to be forgotten:
---Mir, the bloodied but unbowed champion of Russia's space program. Launched in 1986 on what was supposed to be a five-year mission, it has been continuously manned since September 1989. Mir barely survived a string of catastrophies in 1997, but was revived with new equipment carried up to it on U.S. shuttle missions. Although Russia promised to terminate the Mir program in 1999 lest it distract their efforts from the ISS, some kind of prolongation of its operations appears likely.

In one sense, the funding (or lack thereof) of the Mir gives the most precise picture of the status of the ISS. Its Service Module, without which no long-term crew can survive, is already officially two years behind schedule, due to inadequate Russian funding. In effect, for a year after its late 1998 launch, Zarya will mostly fly unmanned until it is mated with the Service Module.

As a result, the ISS currently aloft will remain unmanned for more than triple the period for which it was designed. It will have to be nursed by remote control by flight controllers at the Korolov Mission Control Center, north of Moscow, and at NASA's facility in Houston.

Even after the crucial Service Module is attached to the ISS, months more might pass while it is outfitted before the long-term three-man crew is able to go aboard--unless, according to a brand-new plan, the crew is sent aloft before those outfitting flights, and makes do with what they find.

The current problem is that the design lifetimes of Zarya's avionics and the amount of rocket propellants aboard were based on schedules that have had to be extended from four to more than 12 months (disregarding the fact that some components were already well into their service lifetime when installed). Although Zarya can be refueled and its avionics boxes replaced during shuttle visits, the recently stretched mission is opening the entire ISS program up to new risks.

As if to prove this very point, the transmitter in the U.S. module broke down early in April. It had been designed to operate for the short interval between the Zarya and Unity launches and the later Service Module launch; and if the original schedule had held (calling for Service Module launch in April), it would have lasted long enough. Fortunately, an extra shuttle mission had been added to the schedule for May, mostly to carry equipment the Russians had been unable to load onto their vehicles, so that the crew was able to fix the U.S. radio.

Pride of place
The ISS now consists of two sections: the U.S.-built Unity node and Zarya, which houses temporary control [Fig. 1]. Zarya is sort of a construction crew trailer on a building site. For essentially U.S. domestic political reasons--something seen again and again in ISS development--the United States paid for Zarya.

The module was "invented" to avoid launching the Russian Service Module first, followed by the U.S. node--which, to ISS planners, would make the station look like a Russian vehicle with subsequently added U.S. appendages. Instead, Zarya was bedecked with a small U.S. flag, declaring itself to be a U.S. module; when the Service Module eventually shows up, the Russians will appear to be in a subsidiary role. (Just to confuse things, the United States does in fact "own" Zarya, having paid for it, yet the Russians do all its remote control and do not even tell NASA its command codes.)

At about the time Zarya reached orbit, in late 1998, the launch schedules agreed upon by NASA and the Russian Space Agency collapsed. The Russian government had cut funding to its own space agency every year through the mid-1990s. When a major economic crisis hit the country in the fall of 1998, the central government not only stopped funding its own space program, but was even taxing all foreign cash contributions, including NASA's.

In effect, the Russian space agency was being required to send to Moscow a cut of the U.S. monies it had received precisely because Moscow had failed to support it well enough in the first place.

Mir's nine lives
Meanwhile, in mid-February, Russia's existing space station Mir plugged away past its 13th year in orbit, and a new crew was launched for a six-month mission. That Soyuz crew comprised a veteran Russian commander, a French astronaut whose government paid cash for his six-month ticket, and a Slovakian "guest cosmonaut" on a week-long visit, whose trip was paid for on credit.

Mir appears to be in adequate health, all things considered. The rash of spectacular breakdowns throughout 1997 [see To Probe Further,] had eased when nine shuttle trips between 1996 and 1998 brought new equipment and supplies. Breakdowns may still be occurring, but without a U.S. presence on board, they probably are just not announced. Occasionally news of problems does leak out. In April, for example, Russia's last geostationary radio relay satellite broke down, cutting off communication with Mir except through a handful of ground stations within Russia.

Still, nobody knows what will happen when this newest Mir expedition ends. The lifetime of Russia's manned Soyuz transport spacecraft reaches its limit sometime in August, when it must return to Earth--with the Mir crew aboard, who do not stay in the station without a Soyuz as a lifeboat. NASA had hoped that the Russians would follow through with their plans to de-orbit the Mir over the South Pacific in August. But that option has become physically impossible: far from letting Mir's orbit decay lower and lower, Russian controllers have been re-boosting it.

Early in June, Russian space officials announced that the current crew would leave the Mir empty when they come back to Earth in August or September. The station would slowly drift lower until early 2000, when it would be steered into the atmosphere over an uninhabited region of the South Pacific.

But this announcement may only be a threat by the Russian space agency so that its own government will provide more money. The agency could still send up a new crew (three teams of cosmonauts are in training for such a mission) if private funding or supplemental Russian government appropriations can be arranged.

The uncertainty frustrates reliable planning for the continued assembly of the ISS, which was supposed to replace the Mir and now must compete with it for meager Russian resources. And paradoxically, the almost bankrupt state of Russia's space establishment has given it a powerful negotiating tool in light of the U.S. investment, political and financial, in the ISS. What is being played out is the old adage: if you owe the bank $5000, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank $500 million, you own the bank.

Orbits in motion
This past November, as the launches of Zarya and Unity approached, even the relatively simple task of devising orbits for the ISS and Mir stirred up controversy. Russian ground sites cannot rapidly switch back and forth between the frequencies and codes of the two space stations. Russian officials asked that the orbits of the two space stations be designed so that one space station would complete its daily passes over a ground site before the other space station came into that site's range. Practically speaking, during the three years of detailed pre-flight mission design and planning, the Russian orbital experts had insisted that the orbital plane of the ISS be shifted far away from the orbital plane of Mir.

In the final design, this requirement was satisfied by having the points on the equator where each station is heading northbound (the longitude of the ascending node) set 165 degrees apart, with Zarya west of Mir [Fig. 2]. In spherical trigonometry, the two orbital planes intersect at an angle of about 90 degrees--that is, as far apart as they can possibly be. (The circular orbits of the two stations are separated by about 50 km in altitude.)

Then, only a month before launch, the Russians changed their minds. They wanted to transfer equipment from Mir, including perhaps several of its research modules, to the ISS. But this could not be done without another impossibly large 90-degree change in the orbital plane.

NASA experts speaking off the record with IEEE Spectrum suspected that the last-minute demand had more to do with having NASA prolong Mir than with helping to build the ISS. The United States rejected the request. Zarya was launched 20 November into the originally agreed-upon plane, and the assembly of the ISS began.

Since then, the smooth sailing of the International Space Station has had only enough bumps to keep things interesting for ground controllers in both countries. Communications and command sequences have been practiced, and the complicated software interfaces between the two nations' modules have been tested by forwarding signals to each module through the other (until the U.S. radio broke in April).

Coordination between operators in both control centers, in Korolov and Houston, has been polished. There have been the predictable slew of minor anomalies--called "funnies" on NASA documentation--that require some attention and resolution, but there have been no emergencies.

Electrical 'funnies'
On 11 January 1999, the ISS suffered its most serious problem so far: following measurements of dropping voltage, a series of human commands and automated actions in the station resulted in the shutdown of all but the most critical systems, such as the radio link and attitude control. Technically, the situation was manageable, and was eventually isolated and fixed. But both the cause of the problem and the process of solving it are disturbingly symptomatic of the program as a whole.

The trouble began as a result of initially expected operations. In the course of the normal periodic drift in ISS's orbit relative to the Sun, Zarya's solar arrays can operate at less than peak efficiency. During one of these periods, main bus voltage dropped from the nominal 28 V toward an emergency level of 26.5 V, where an automated load shed routine kicks in (load shed is a procedure that shuts down a list of nonessential power users).

Russian controllers noticed the voltage drop, realized that it might soon trigger the load shed routine, and tried to intervene before it started. They sent shut-off commands to heaters and smoke detectors and other noncritical items. But in spite of everything, they could not keep bus voltage high enough; the load shed was activated, and all but the most essential equipment went dead [Fig. 3].

In the course of the next few days, as the station's orbit went through its normal shifting in space, solar illumination and consequent power generation improved. Ground controllers commanded systems back on one by one, restoring the station's normal configuration. They also tried to understand why they were caught flat-footed by the speed of the voltage drop in the main bus.

To start with, they thought that another power problem might have been related. Early on in the flight, Russian controllers had noticed a degradation in performance of Zarya's six nickel-cadmium batteries. The batteries seemed not to be absorbing full charge from the solar arrays, and the problem appeared to be worsening with time.
Deep-discharge cycles, which NiCd batteries need occasionally to maintain peak efficiency, had been planned to take place once a month. But they soon had to be performed more and more frequently, and by mid-January were being cycled every five days.

The 27-kg Russian batteries, each a bit larger than an automobile battery, are rated at 60 Ah. Although designed for a five-year lifetime, they were already three years old when launched, and there was concern that the performance degradation was age-related. NASA's weekly report on 13 January bravely asserted that "the slight decrease in voltage that had been seen is not believed to have been an indication of any mechanical problems." But things were far worse.

Within a week of the automatically tripped load shed on 11 January, NASA engineers began to suspect that the problem lay not with the batteries themselves but with the control circuits that calculated charge levels. The batteries' actual charge was below the calculated charge, one engineer suggested at a weekly status review meeting, "due to premature termination of the charge cycle."

By February, Russian specialists had confirmed NASA's fears: a measurement device on all six batteries called the MIRT, the Russian initials for "integrating ammeter," had a generic design flaw in one circuit. As a result of the flaw, the batteries reported a full charge no matter how low their actual state--and even when it was dangerously low, any further charging from the solar panels was automatically terminated.

Houston flight controllers developed a procedure to "spoof" the MIRT circuits and force full charges on the batteries. They tricked the charge controller circuit into ignoring its erroneous estimate of actual accumulated charge, so that it would stay hooked up to the solar cells for a longer time.

But even with this temporary work-around, the greater concern was over the batteries' lifetime, which was critically affected by how much and how frequently the batteries charged and discharged.

But there was a yet more worrisome aspect of the MIRT flaw, as U.S. experts pointed out. "This problem could have been detected by ground testing prior to flight," one specialist told Spectrum. "But the Russians skipped end-to-end testing--they never put the whole power system through a series of charge-discharge cycles," he continued, attributing the failure in oversight to the lack of time and money.

(In fact, early in Zarya's flight, similar circumstances had led to a different type of electrical failure, traced to another battery controller. The design of the battery called for redundant pass-throughs on a circuit board, but the manufacturer had built only one pass-through. One of the leads broke a few days after the November launch, crippling the circuit that connected the battery to the main bus. The circuit was repaired last December by the STS-88 crew, when they hooked Unity and Zarya together [Fig. 4].)

On manual
After the load shed event on 11 January, another significant oversight in the design of the power system caused trouble. Once the station was returned to its nominal configuration, the ground controllers attempted to reset the load shed routine that had been triggered by the main bus drop below 26.5 V. The routine was still necessary to restore protection during the 10-12 hours a day when the station was out of range of Russian tracking sites.

To their surprise and dismay, ground personnel discovered that there was no ground command to reset the routine. Only an astronaut typing on a keyboard aboard the station could put it back on alert. One manually instigated load shed had in fact occurred before, during the STS-88 flight, a result of still immature coordination between flight controllers in Moscow and Houston. This time, the station was unmanned, which was planned from the very beginning. But the Russian designers had apparently overlooked the need for off-site reset command.

Engineers then realized that the same battery hardware was installed on the Service Module, still on the ground, and had to be replaced and retested. This fairly basic oversight seems to imply seriously inadequate Russian ground testing and system analyses, and raises questions as to whether other undiscovered flaws exist.

The Russians insisted on replacing all six of the MIRT units on the batteries. As with every shuttle flight, the load and task schedule had been prepared long in advance, but a new one was drawn up to accommodate the repair. The timeline of the next shuttle launch coming up, STS-96 (launched on 27 May), was hastily rearranged for the new task, and the units were replaced as soon as the crew came aboard Zarya [Fig. 5].

Test? Launch!
Inadequate ground preparation on the part of Russia's Mission Control Center had been the cause of another recent error, according to French space official Guy Pignolet, who observed a recent Mir experiment from the Russian control center. In the experiment, a thin-film aluminum space mirror, called Znamya, was to be unfurled as part of a program to illuminate regions of the Earth at night with reflected sunlight. In February, as the rotating dispenser unfurled what was supposed to become an aluminum disk 25 meters in diameter, a command was issued to deploy a boom-mounted antenna. The boom extended directly into the space where the disk was deploying; the aluminum wrapped itself around the boom and tore itself into shreds.

After the failure, Vladimir Syromyatnikov, the developer of the mirror, remarked bitterly to a TASS reporter that "Our style of life is responsible--such a complex experiment demands more time, more specialists." When asked why the command to deploy the antenna had not been canceled, he answered, "Because we didn't think of it."

All aboard
In addition to errors in testing, other kinds may arise. The temptation may be growing for the Russians simply to cut corners in any number of areas to speed up the ISS Service Module's long-delayed launch--even though "shortcuts" led to the early-1999 failures of Zarya's electrical power system and to the kind of superficial planning that destroyed the Znamya experiment on Mir. Yet it easily seduces program managers who are obsessed with only the most immediate schedule goals.

Consider the progress of the Service Module, finally assembled and shipped by rail in early May to the Russian launch site at Baykonur, in central Kazakhstan. The Russians were still claiming that the module could be launched by a Proton rocket on 20 September 1999. NASA had prudently adjusted its schedules, expecting a 20 November launch; more realistic officials thought it unlikely to fly before early 2000.

As the clock ticked away and their money was being eaten up, the Russians dispensed with buying flight spares--that is, hardware qualified to replace units that failed in testing. So now the Service Module--the life support of the entire ISS crew--has no backup flight-qualified units for key systems, such as for oxygen generation.

By March, NASA sources were telling Spectrum of a growing desperation to "get it in the air" almost no matter what the equipment's condition, with the hope that the inevitable breakdowns could be repaired on later shuttle flights. Space experts with long memories have told Spectrum that this obsession with sticking to a schedule by overlooking adequate pre-flight testing is frighteningly reminiscent of the push to launch the doomed Challenger shuttle in January 1986. And even if systems do not fail catastrophically, in the long run it is hundreds of times cheaper and easier to find and fix problems on the ground than it is in space.

Just as imprudent as those pushing to launch any hardware at all, seemingly, were those who wanted a manned presence as soon as possible. After the shuttle mission to the ISS in May (the one that carried the MIRT battery replacements), NASA had expected three more shuttle flights and one Russian supply flight before sending up a crew aboard a Soyuz. The four flights were to add equipment for power generation as well as spare parts and backup hardware for critical life support systems.

Instead, responding to the prolonged delays, Russian and U.S. space officials developed a new plan: sending up the three-man crew to the Service Module as soon as it reaches orbit, without waiting for the four preparatory missions. Thus, ISS's first long-term crew--U.S. astronaut Bill Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergey Krikalyov--would be aboard a module before the Zarya/Unity complex begins its automated approach and docking to it. The major advantage of this option is that the crew could provide manual backup to the automated linkup if necessary.

But by going to the Service Module so early, the crew would be exposed to the risk of not having the backup systems that would seem mandatory. What's more, it would have to rely on the systems in the Service Module, whose pre-flight verification is likely to have been even less thorough than those that so clearly failed for Zarya and the space mirror. But if worse came to worst, and enough time were available, the crew could abandon ship, flying home aboard the docked Soyuz.

The Soyuz shell game
With the prospect of prolonging the lifetime of the worn Mir space station, plans for the ISS become even more convoluted. If there is to be a next Mir crew, it is to be launched in August, with two fresh cosmonauts. Only one Soyuz will be available, and that one--Soyuz 204--is now being completed in part with U.S. money provided last fall to the Russian space agency.

Once built, the Soyuz-204 is to be allocated to the ISS's first manned expedition with Bill Shepherd and his crew. That launch date, with the ISS's so-called early crew option--and if the Service Module is actually launched on schedule--would be some time in October 1999. Recall that the Soyuz would stay there, as a lifeboat in a space station that is already low on flight spares.

So much for October. The Russians, however, provisionally lined up their own mission to Mir for two months earlier, in August--without ordering another Soyuz from the factory. Now, it takes the Russians 18-24 months of fully funded work to produce a Soyuz. Any next-in-line Soyuz after the 204 would not be ready until February 2000, and then only if NASA hands over more money.

But the Russians wanted a summer launch for the Mir as well as a fall launch for the ISS. So, for the first launch, they finessed the problem: a Soyuz in hand, or almost in hand, is worth more than one in the bush. The Soyuz 204, it was reported in Russia, would go to Mir.

Recall that the 204 is partly paid for by the United States expressly to keep Russia from further delaying the ISS schedule. Yet the next-in-line Soyuz surely will not be ready by the ISS-crew launch date of October. So the ISS schedule has been delayed more, rather than less. In addition--and more maddening, to some people--U.S. funds essentially were diverted to further the purely Russian interests in the Mir project.

Such a shell game might be expected to generate some heat in the United States, and in fact one NASA source told Spectrum that "NASA would not look kindly" on any Russian attempt to divert Soyuz-204 from ISS to Mir. But these are words of the diplomat. In fact, explained a congressional source close to the project, everything is legal and correct. In its latest contracts with the Russian space agency (RSA), NASA carefully avoided specifying how U.S. money would be spent.

According to the congressional insider, "NASA conceded that [the Mir mission] is one of the things it expected RSA to use the money for." Nonetheless, Moscow's announcement in early June that no crew would be sent to Mir to replace the current one may have allowed it to dodge a major confrontation with NASA.

Triple production
Russian commitments to other components of the ISS program also seem to be built on air. In 2000, NASA's flight plans in support of the ISS call for a total of 10 Russian launchings: two of the manned Soyuz shuttle and six of the unmanned Progress shuttle (a modified Soyuz that is used for one-way trips), and two more modified ISS modules based on Soyuz designs.

In reality, as it has kept the Mir program afloat over the past few years, Russia has been able to annually build and launch only about half that number. To satisfy its commitments to the United States, even if it pulls the plug on Mir this month, Russia must double its spacecraft production rate in less than a year. If it wants to keep Mir, its annual spacecraft production rate must triple.

Shortly before he resigned in April, Randy Brinkley, NASA's space station program manager, was asked by Spectrum whether he believed Russia was capable of that flight rate next year. He answered softly and simply, "No."

Official production records from the Progress plant in Samara in the Volga region, which builds the booster rockets for the Soyuz and Progress, confirm Brinkley's skepticism. Russian plans show 18 rockets scheduled for delivery in 2000. Apparently it did not seem worthwhile even to cover up the evidence: only four rockets are allocated to missions for the ISS, and none to Mir. The others are for commercial customers or Russian Ministry of Defense missions.

Clearly the over-ambitious Russian promises of 10 flights--or even 14, if Mir is prolonged--are either delusional or prevaricating. And unless NASA also is delusional or prevaricating, if ISS plans are not severely modified, more delays will catch NASA "by surprise" next year.

Wishful thinking
Without constant double and triple mortgages, so to speak, the Russians could barely provide the manpower, material, and services needed by the ISS outpost. Yet somehow they still want to be a two-house family, holding onto Mir and its $250 million-a-year operating budget. Many in Russia still hope to find that necessary funding for Mir from "off budget" sources.

In late January, then-Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov authorized the Energia Rocket and Space Corp., Moscow, which owns and operates Mir, to begin soliciting money from private sources to completely finance Mir. Nongovernment funding was nothing new for Mir. Russia began selling seats on manned space missions to the Salyut-7 space station in the early 1980s and by the mid-'90s was earning between $50 million and $100 million per year just from European space organizations eager to fly astronauts aboard Mir.

In January of this year, just when pulling the plug on Mir seemed a done deed, Russian space officials began talking up a "secret foreign investor" who would furnish the Mir's entire operating budget. In return, the mysterious investor would be given in-flight cosmonaut man-hours for research and other activities on Mir.

Speculation was rife about the hoped-for saviors of Mir: a reticent Australian millionaire, the decidedly unreticent billionaire and ex-U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot, or even the Chinese space program, which wanted a docking site for its planned two-man space capsules. Some pocket money was supposed to come from a film company shooting scenes aboard Mir--a spinoff from earlier deals with advertisers.

But by early February, hopes for financial salvation outside government sources had collapsed. As Yuri Koptev, head of the Russian Space Agency, told newsmen, "Unfortunately, our lives are such that we sometimes consider the desirable already a reality. It was just wishful thinking."
Spectrum has learned that the potential financiers did exist: a group of U.S. businessmen in Florida that had intended to line up commercial users willing to buy time aboard the born-again Mir. But Mir's capabilities fell short of many of their customers' requirements--for instance, less than 10 kW is available for experiments, and even then the power is not assured. After they had looked deeper into the deal, most of the potential investors passed on it.

Then in May, some Russian officials again placed their bets on the British industrialist who supposedly would pay for a ride on Mir next August, and who they thought could be interested in some commercial arrangement. But this scheme also soon collapsed. Finally, Russian space officials asserted they would keep Mir going even with bank loans, if necessary.

The long goodbye
Until now, space stations have had limited lifetimes and died more or less gracefully [see "To dust they shall return"]. In the early '70s, NASA's Skylab and the early Soviet Salyut stations carried supplies for less than a year of operations. Later Salyuts could be resupplied and thus could operate for up to three or four years. And Mir, designed for a five-year lifetime, has just passed 13 years.

Although by April 1999 the Russians were supposed to have made a "final decision" about deorbiting Mir, they were still boosting its orbit. This was a clear signal that they intended to prolong its life well beyond the official termination date, though they had not had not told NASA officially of the plan.

Why this need to prolong Mir, and by so doing wrench apart even more its commitment to its international partners? Perhaps the Russians realize that the longer NASA is kept in doubt about Mir's fate, hoping that it will be terminated as promised, the longer the flow of U.S. money once earmarked for its successor can be continued.

Despite these difficulties, officials in both countries are committed to seeing the ISS through. Russian Space Agency director Yuri Koptev has repeatedly warned his countrymen that Russian withdrawal from its ISS commitments would mean cancellation of Western commercial space contracts, now approaching a billion dollars a year. For its part, the White House still sees the partnership as central to its policy toward Russia, and repeated efforts in Congress to expel it from the ISS grand plan have been roundly voted down.

As the ISS completes its first months in orbit, and Mir completes what may be its last months, the political and technological sparring in both programs has underscored an old lesson: whatever space experts plan and attempt, reality still turns up surprises. The only reliable prediction is that a year from now these projects will look nothing like today's expectations.

To probe further
Up-to-date information on developments in the International Space Station (ISS) and the Mir programs can be obtained from a number of specialized Internet sites. The official NASA view is reflected on the World Wide Web at http://spaceflight.NASA.gov/index-m.html. The best news media compilation of reports is Florida Today's Space Today, on the Web at www.flatoday.com/space/today/index.htm.
The most respected private Web site covering space technology and politics is Keith Cowing's "NASA Watch" at www.reston.com/NASA/watch.html. The site's jumping-off spot for the ISS is www.reston.com/NASA/station.news.html.
Unique insights into the people who planned and performed NASA's Shuttle-Mir program in 1995-98 can be found in Bryan Burrough's Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis aboard Mir (HarperCollins, New York, 1998). Although riddled with minor factual flaws, its views of the personalities involved are on target.
On the Russian space industry as a whole, see the author's "Russia's space program: running on empty," IEEE Spectrum, December 1995, pp. 18-35. See also his article, "Shuttle-Mir's lessons for the International Space Station," Spectrum, June 1998, pp. 28-37.

About the author
James Oberg, a veteran of 22 years at NASA's Mission Control center in Houston, is now a full-time writer and a consultant to ABC News. His most recent book, Space Power Theory, was released by the U.S. Space Command in April.



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SLEUTHING SOVIET SPACE SECRETS

Foreword to "Almanac of Soviet Manned Space Flight", pp. viii-x
Dennis Newkirk, Gulf Publishing Company, Houston, Texas, 1990
ISBN 0-87201-848-2

Sleuthing the secrets of the Soviet space program has required a strange and rare collection of skills. Whereas NASA overwhelms researchers with a torrent of data, interviews, photographs, and multifaceted minutiae, the Soviets traditionally have attempted to strictly control the space information available to the outside world, so as to establish images that often have little relation to reality. An investigator must conduct a wide-ranging survey, must be able to recognize the significant details that slip past the secrecy, must balance them against sound engineering judgment, and must then assess their significance in the "big picture."

Metaphorically, one is working with scattered pieces to several jigsaw puzzles. Many of the pieces are damaged, and some are counterfeit. Some might belong in different puzzles. Some are faded, folded, stretched by time into new shapes.

Under these circumstances, what hope is there for a reasonably accurate image? Dennis Newkirk is working in the grand tradition of earlier sleuths who have succeeded in laying out the broad outlines of the known, of pinpointing detailed chronologies and technical specifications, and of sketching the boundary of the unknown. Much Soviet data are eventually published, even if in obscure places, sometimes by mistake. Independent Western observers, particularly radio listeners and naked-eye skywatchers, regularly add crucial information. And most important, the technical feasibility of spaceflight engineering (as practiced in other spacefaring nations) gives a touchstone against which competing hypotheses can be evaluated.

The result here is a reliable reconstruction of what seems to have been happening in the Soviet space program, as if the Soviets had never attempted to cover up their embarrassments and politically awkward realities. These days, under the glasnost tide, new official Soviet revelations repeatedly confirm the estimates made by the tenacious sleuths whom Newkirk has joined. This validates old techniques and supports new probes into hitherto impenetrable darknesses.

Why should such an effort even be required? The "game" often appears tedious, trivial, and dead-ended. Years of efforts by dozens of dedicated Western sleuths often condense to a few extra details of one Soviet mission's backup crew, or one unsuccessful precursor test with an ad hoc cover story, or a blueprint of one canceled space prototype. Who benefits from such labors?

Ask any sleuth, ask Dennis Newkirk or myself or our colleagues around the world, and the first answer is personal satisfaction. We climb the mountain of Soviet space secrecy "because it is there." They are trying to hide things; our human reaction is to want to expose these things. And our successes have been considerable, as this book clearly details.

Moreover, eventual Soviet admissions have been prodded by Western revelations, and merely waiting patiently would be in vain without the pressure of publication. By making many things secret, the Soviets have made them even more "juicy" for the Western news media, and this has guaranteed widespread publication of the very thing the Soviets would like to withhold. Recent developments show considerable maturity in Moscow, and current (if only temporary?) trends are to be more candid about current activities, about a portion of planned missions, and about selected chapters of the past. But the underlying cause of much of today's glasnost is the bitter lesson that such secrets will sooner or later be dug out by Western space sleuths anyway. Today's Soviet honesty is a tribute to the failure of their past policies of dishonesty, and that failure was brought about by conscious actions of the Western sleuths.

Another reason is that history requires a contemporary analysis of events. Future generations will have neither the knowledge of the environment, nor the access to all printed and verbal material, nor the accumulated wisdom of today's sleuths. Centuries from now, when the names of sports heroes, actors, preachers, even presidents, and yes; of countries, too, are all forgotten, the human activity for which this century will be known will be the breakout into space. For those scholars in unknown, unborn languages, our finest bequest -- besides the very fact of spaceflight -- will be our documentation of how it was done.

There are benefits to our own generation as well. An appreciation of how the Soviets conduct their manned space program has value to the American manned space program, both to learn techniques of advantage and to identify blind avenues to be avoided. The Soviets are putting the best of their aerospace industry into spaceflight, so any assessment of their space activities is automatically a measure of their highest capabilities in aerospace technology. Such assessments of capabilities allow speculative inquiries into actual intent, and give, via views of space hardware with well-defined applications, unprecedented views into the minds of Kremlin policymakers.

Both nations will be pursuing parallel manned space programs into the next century, into the unforeseeable future. These activities will be both in competition and in cooperation. Rational and successful planning for American space activities absolutely requires sound technical appraisals of the Soviet past, present, and future in space, and readers will find what they need in Newkirk's impressive catalog. Beyond the hardware, they will detect the thrill of the successful sleuth, and they can be confident -- as the Soviets remain anxious -- that such dogged, skillful investigators continue to assault the boundaries of what the Soviets would like to allow us to know about their space efforts, to the complete picture of what we must know in order to chart our course into the next millennium. This book is one such map.


Russia's ""Bloody Border" (1988 book chapter)



The Bloody Border
By James Oberg
Chapter 3 from 'Uncovering Soviet Disasters'
Random House, 1988
Pp. 32-49

"The protection of the USSR state border is a very important, inalienable par of the defense of the socialist fatherland. The USSR state border is inviolable. Any attempts to
violate it are resolutely suppressed." Preamble to the "Law of the Border of the USSR

After five years of official silence Moscow revealed its version of an aerial tragedy on the USSR's southern border. But as in the metaphor of nested masks, what the Soviets uncovered was itself a counterfeit image, and beneath it was not so much heroic drama but bloody farce.

Soviet Air Force Captain Valentin Kulyapin realized he was still alive when he felt the blast of cold air on his face. His parachute had opened properly, and he was descending slowly toward the ground. His jet interceptor was plunging to the ground in flames. The intruder plane, its tail badly damaged by the collision Kulyapin had deliberately instigated, flew into a mountainside as the Russian pilot watched.
P. 33 -------

It was July 18, 1981, and the four crewmen of the chartered cargo airliner which had strayed across the Soviet border had just paid for their carelessness with their lives.

On a map the Soviet state border is just a line, like any other nation's political boundary. In real life, however, the Soviet border seems to be unique in the world. It comprises an
invisible menace, a life-threatening zone which appears designed to destroy anyone who wittingly or unwittingly crosses it. Other nations have both borders and powerful military forces, but the United States, or Japan, or Sweden, or even China is not known to blow airborne intruders out of the air regularly. Such behavior is not normal by contemporary world standards.

While a simple ideological explanation might attribute such behavior to pure Soviet malevolence, the reasons for the occurrences are sometimes difficult to divine. In large part, however, technological failures and accidents seem to have conspired to reinforce instinctive Soviet paranoia, leading to murderous results.

The doomed aircraft this time, in mid-1981, was a Canadair Limited CL-44 transport, registration number LV-JTN, one of two owned by an obscure Argentine cargo line named 'Transporte Areo Rio Platense. Earlier in 1981 the aircraft had ostensibly been chartered through intermediaries to fly cargo from Larnaca (Cyprus) to Teheran (Iran). The airliner, as it turned out, first picked up the cargo in Tel Aviv before flying it to neutral Cyprus and on to war-torn Iran. The cargo consisted of weapons for the war against Iraq.

Aboard the aircraft on the return leg to Cyprus were three Argentine crew niembers and a British citizen. Hector Cordero was the pilot; Jose Burgueno and Hermete Boasso were his crew. Stuart McCafferty was officially listed as "purser," but he was a representative of the brokers handling the arms sale. On July 18 the crew was making its third round trip.

The aircraft departed Teheran and headed northwest toward Turkish airspace. Because of intermittent air-to-air combat along the Iran-Iraq border, the airplane (like most others flying between Iran and points west) flew as far north as possible, skirting the southern Soviet border along the Caucasus Mountains.

There the crewmen made their mistake. Instead of following a heading of about 300 degrees to the Turkish. border and then turning left to a heading of 240 degrees direct to Cyprus, the
p. 34 -------
aircraft seems to have been on a course about 5 degrees farther to the right, to the north. That took it over a section of Soviet Azerbaijan which juts southward along the generally southeast-northwest trend of the border. It flew parallel to the border, but on the Soviet side, for ten or twenty minutes.

By Soviet accounts released five years later, the "intruder" disregarded all radio calls (nobody at any Iranian or Turkish control tower seems to have heard such calls) and then ignored signals from escorting Soviet planes. That the Soviet military had botched the contact procedures seems much more likely, considering the level of skill (or lack of it) shown on other, similar occasions.

Kulyapin was one of the Soviet pilots on alert at the time the aircraft was spotted. He was also the deputy squadron political officer, the zampolit, a position generally characterized less by flying skill than by ideological zeal. In air-to-ground communication he was "pilot 733." As he approached the target, he heard that jets from other bases were breaking off their intercepts prematurely as the result of low fuel reserves. He was the only pilot to catch up with the intruder.

Kulyapin was keyed up for combat, according to his thoughts as reported in the much later newspaper account. "Who would dare cross the border!" he marveled to himself. He rapidly visualized the terrain over which the intruder was flying and tried to imagine what targets worth spying on could be there.

As he, now alone, approached the target, his controllers radioed that the target was turning toward the b6rder (that is, toward the west). Kulvapin recalled feeling outraged. "What's this!" he wondered. "An evasive maneuver, a trick, or an attempt to slip out unpunished? He won't get away!" As he closed in from behind, he performed an IFF ("Identify- Friend or Foe") radar transponder interrogation, but there was no answer, which meant it was a foreign aircraft.

Kulyapin reported later that once he had caught up with the intruder aircraft, the "enemy" pilot had deliberately ignored him, even though he had performed all standard visual contact procedures. "They flew nose to nose.... Kulyapin saw the heads of the foreign pilots turned in his direction," the newspaper account later claimed. "He gave them the conventional signal to make a landing approach on a designated course. In response he got no reaction whatsoever."
p. 35---------
As the young Russian pilot was paralleling the intruder off its left wing, it suddenly turned in to him, forcing him to dive and avoid collision. Kulyapin interpreted this as a hostile act designed to force him into a spin. "The intruders, it seemed, were counting on the Soviet pilot panicking and breaking up in the propellers when they made their sharp maneuver," claimed the newspaper account. This left turn also put the intruder on a course out of Soviet territory, toward the Araks River, which was already visible in the distance. Kulyapin was seized by anger. "Who's giving it to whom, huh!" he savagely thought. "Well, we'll see--let's fight."

Most likely the Argentine pilots were oblivious of the intercept and had just made the normal turn toward Cyprus, which was due at about this time. But the Soviet interpretation was entirely different: "The crew of the intruder aircraft arrogantly continued to move toward confrontation. They understood that the Soviet pilot would try to cut them off from the border, which was only a few kilometers away." By fantasizing such lines of thought in the minds of the foreign pilots, the official Soviet account was able to portray them as unambiguous enemies.

"I can't let them push me across the ribbon," Kulyapin realized, thinking of the nearby river border. "733 to base," he called out. "The intruder is not following my orders. He is trying to escape across the border."

Basing its decisions on the excited (if not by now hysterical) accounts by Kulyapin, ground control ordered that the obviously hostile intruder be shot down. Kulyapin's jet (of an unidentified type) evidently had no guns, but it did have missiles. However, Kulyapin concluded that he would be unable to drop back the mile or two needed for a good radar lock-on and missile launch in the few moments before the aircraft crossed the border.

Instead, since he was right up near the airliner, the zampolit instinctively decided to emulate the glorious Soviet heroes of the Great Patriotic War (World War II) and ram the enemy plane. He announced his intentions to ground control and was asked to repeat them--but nobody ordered him not to carry out his attack.

Kulyapin looked ahead of him to where the river was growing nearer. On the ground he spotted a moving black spot.
p.36 ---------
"The intruder aircraft's shadow fell on our territory," went the story. "An evil, nasty shadow."

The ramming plan was not entirely suicidal since the Russian pilot hoped to cripple the four-engine turboprop transport with strategic blows from the top of his own jet. To do this, he flew in close to the right side of the tail and began bumping into the stabilizer. Suddenly his canopy shattered and shards of glass sprayed around the cockpit, bouncing off his helmet and shoulders as he cringed. Nothing heavier hit him, so he pulled back on the control stick and rammed the intruder again.

His own jet began shaking violently as its control system failed. He grabbed the red ejection handles and pulled, noting that the cockpit clock read 14:44 Moscow summertime.

Kulyapin never heard the detonation as a tremendous force threw him upward, probably passing within feet of the tail of the airliner. But upon regaining his senses moments later he looked around him. The newspaper described what he saw. "Like an overturned autumn leaf the intruder aircraft was falling in a steep spiral: its right tail fin had been cut clean off." Kulyapin thought: "You never come out horizontal from that flight path." He watched the intruder crash and burn.

Western aviation experts who have examined Kulyapin's account of the encounter are highly skeptical. Pilots who have flown the CL-44 report that air turbulence behind the engines is so violent that it would have been impossible to control a throttled-down jet to hold a position directly behind and below one wing. The consensus is that Kulyapin misjudged a turn and hit the airliner by accident, afterward deciding to make up a story of glorious self-sacrifice.

The cargo plane was quickly reported overdue by the Argentine company, and a check with Turkish air traffic controllers revealed that radar had shown the aircraft disappearing into Soviet airspace. Still, the Soviets were at something of a loss to account for the event, and they took four days to announce that the foreign plane had crashed into a Soviet jet--and then blamed it for the collision. Said TASS: "The crew of the plane did not respond to any inquiries by Soviet ground air traffic control services and to attempts to render help to it, [but] continued the flight over the Soviet territory, performing dangerous maneuverings. Some time later the plane collided with a Soviet plane, was destroyed, and burned." Officially, at least at first, it was a
p. 37 ---------
negligent accident. Oddly, TASS never identified the nationality of the aircraft.

At first the Soviets ascribed no hostile intent to the irrtruder, but soon began the campaign to prove it had really been an "enemy" that deserved to be destroyed. Within two weeks propaganda distortions had begun. Although the plane, for example, had not been flying into Soviet airspace when it was destroyed but had been about to cross the border out of Soviet airspace, the Soviets conveniently changed its course 180 degrees as proof of aggressive intent. For example, on August 1 a Persian-language broadcast on the so-called National Voice of Iran (a Soviet-run facility which purported to be a native
Iranian station) gave this version: "The Soviet Union's aviation authorities ordered the plane to land. However, the said plane, without paying the slightest heed to warnings by Soviet planes, continued its flight into the Soviet Union's airspace. At this point, there remains no alternative for any country, including the Soviet Union, but to prevent ful-ther flight of the aggressive plane and to neutralize it."

At the crash site thirty miles southeast of Yerevan (just across the border from the conjunction of Iran and Turkey, in the far-northwestern corner of Azerbaidjan), Soviet investigators doubtlessly combed the wreckage immediately. The bodies were
moved to a morgue in Yerevan. No "spy gear" of any kind could have been found, or the world would have been loudly and self-righteously told about it. The aircraft's flight recorders (if any, and they probably existed) were removed and hidden away (the crew's final conversations would have proved its innocence), and if the Argentines ever asked for the recorders back, they were rebuffed.

But even with such physical evidence the Soviets would still be officially claiming five years later that the plane had been flying without markings. This might initially have been based purely on Kulyapin's testimony that "it was a four-engine military aircraft." Yet Leopoldo Brave, the Argentine ambassador to Moscow, had been allowed to visit the crash site, and he clearly saw the Argentine flag still distinctly painted on a surviving portion of wing. The Russian pilot should easily have been able to spot it as well.

The charred bodies of the crewmen were returned to Argentine and British authorities. Meanwhile. Moscow's deputy min-
p. 38---------
ister of foreign affairs, Zemskov, had assured the Argentine ambassador that the Soviet pilot had also been killed in the tragedy. Otherwise, the Argentine officials undoubtedly would have insisted on interviewing him.

Kulyapin, meanwhile, had actually walked away without a scratch (after learning to his relief that he had come down on the proper side of the border). He was duly decorated with the Order of the Red Banner, was sent to the Lenin Military Political Academy for further ideological training, and by 1986 had been posted as a deputy regimental political officer.

By then the Soviets had built up enough pride in his spirit of self-sacrifice that they were willing to boast publicly about it. The April 6, 1986, issue of Red Star published a large portrait of the heroic officer and gave a two-page account of his achievement. "The heroic deed performed by Kulyapin is practically legendary," the newspaper concluded. "But the pilot doesn't like to talk about it randomly at meetings or dinners, although he shares the experience of having rammed a jet [sic!] plane with his fellow airmen in detail. They may need to do it in battle to defeat the enemy. And survive!"

This account of Kulyapin's incredibly stupid feat, compounded by the Soviet air traffic control's failure to contact the doomed Argentine plane by radio, is important in that it reveals in detail the thought processes which might be going through the head of a typical Soviet pilot intercepting an "enemy" aircraft on his country's borders. It has happened numerous times before and since, often with similar tragic consequences.

A legendary hero of an earlier intrusion was a pilot named Boris Vegin. Supposedly he had shot down one intruder, perhaps about 1960. In an account published in 1973 he told a Soviet author about frequently watching enemy spy flights over international waters: Once a Soviet interceptor approached such a spy plane only to fall suddenly into the sea. "It was never recovered and the cause of the pilot's disaster remains unexplained," Vegin recounted. "Possibly the spy plane hit him..." The notion of armed spy planes ready to kill innocent Russian pilots woild encourage other pilots either to exercise caution or, as in Kulyapin's case, to display zealous combativeness.

Another pilot, identified only as "Captain G. Yeliseyev," had also rammed an "intruder" at some date in the 1970s ("a few
p. 39---------
years ago" from 1983). He died in the feat and received the USSR's highest posthumous military honors. Since there are no unaccounted-for Western planes near the Soviet border, the plane which Yeliseyev destroyed could well have been Soviet (there are reports of at least two cases in which Soviet planes were in fact mistakenly destroyed by Soviet air defense forces). Interestingly some details parallel Kulyapin's account (the pilot was a zampolit, and the intruder was trying to escape across the border), but others are quite different (he rammed the intruder at full throttle and was killed).

The eagerness shown by Kulyapin, Yeliseyev, and Vegin to defend the holy Soviet border, while extreme, was hardly unique, as other concrete examples show. On June 21, 1978, a Soviet jet blew an unarmed Iranian helicopter out of the air when it strayed across the border near Ashkhabad in foggy weather. All eight men aboard the training flight were killed. Claimed the Soviets: "It had ignored warnings to land." By now an observer may deduce a pattern in which such warnings, if ever really given, were totally ineffective because of major technical shortcomings in Soviet radio equipment.

The southern USSR border region's reputation was bad enough after the two aircraft losses in 1978 and 1981, but as the Iran-Iraq War dragged on, the region got even more dangerous. In 1984, for example, Alitalia pilot Benito Niolu told a Rome conference that the Iranian-Soviet border was a region of weak navigation signals where "being buzzed by fighters was commonplace" and "the risk of a mistake [is] great." On his weekly flight between Rome and Teheran he reported being "haunted by thoughts of a repetition of the shooting down by fighters of the Korean jumbo jet after straying into Soviet airspace last year." A spokesman for Alitalia, Italy's state airline, reported that the company didn't consider the route dangerous.

Just how easy it could be for the Soviets to destroy an innocent civil airliner by mistake was demonstrated in 1984 over the western Baltic Sea, near Gotland Island. The Swedish government claimed that on August 9, 1984, a Soviet jet fighter pursued -- arguably by mistake -- a civilian Airbus 310 jetliner and intruded thirty miles into Swedish airspace, at one point closing to within about a mile of the unaware airliner. Radio intercepts showed that the Sukhoi 15 fighter had armed and
p. 40----------
locked on its air-to-air missiles. The Soviets, on October 21, officially denied that any such thing had happened and claimed the jet was fifty miles from where the Swedish radars showed it.

They provided carefully labeled maps to demonstrate this and even had testimony from another pilot, who swore he was looking at the jet in question on maneuvers over the Baltic when the Swedes claimed it was over their territory, The conclusive proof offered by Soviet spokesman Vadim Zagladin was: "If` our jet really got as close, the Swedish aircraft would have been able to photograph it. All aircraft are equipped with photographic equipment, but there is no photograph!" When reminded that the jet was tracked directly behind the airliner, out of sight of any of the windows, Zagladin refused to back down: "Well, this is the situation -- no one saw it, no one heard it. And there is no other evidence." 'The Soviets just were not about to admit the possibility of equipment failure or human error on their part.

Previous experience with trigger-happy Soviet pilots in the Baltic Sea area had been even more frightening. Some encounters involved military aircraft and others involved civil aircraft, and it didn't seem as if` the Soviets could tell them apart. On April 8, 1950, a U.S. Navy patrol aircraft had been destroyed by Soviet aircraft only ninety miles southeast of Gotland Island, with the loss of ten American lives. Wreckage of the aircraft,
including bullet-ridden landing gear, was recovered and helped establish its location when attacked. On June 13, 1952, a Swedish C-47 Dakota transport was shot down in the same area, with the loss of eight lives. Three days later a Swedish rescue aircraft (a Catalina seaplane) was shot down by two Soviet MIG-15s, but the crew ditched and was rescued. Another U.S. patrol aircraft was attacked over the Baltic Sea on November 7,
1958, but escaped.

In the late 1970s another American reconnaissance mission over international waters in the Baltic was almost attacked by an overeager Soviet pilot. Aboard the modified four-engine RC-135 (Boeing 707), intelligence officers listened to the air-to-ground conversation between the nearby Soviet jet and its ground control. Ground asked the pilot if he could see "the target," and the Russian enthusiastically replied in the affirmative. "It's a B-52!" he claimed, to which the ground replied calmly, "Count the engines" (a B-52 has eight). Aboard the
p. 41 ------------
American plane, listeners heard with vanishing amusement how the Russian pilot counted slowly to eight. "The guys were freaking out listening to this," recalled one official, who recounted the story to journalist Seymour Hersh. Fortunately the Soviet ground control had no doubts about the identity of the "target" and merely instructed the pilot to take a photograph and return to base. His voice was not heard again over the radio frequencies. More confusion (or less sound judgment) at ground control could have led to a more tragic outcome. Arguably that's the way several of the earlier tragedies had occurred.

And that's the way it may have happened on July 1, 1960, when a routine RE-47 patrol over international waters in the Barents Sea (off Russia's northwestern coast) was attacked by Soviet fighters. The Russians were, perhaps understandably, jumpy because of the recent capture of the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers when his spy plane had been shot down near Sverdlovsk. They shot down the RE-47, killing four crewmen; two others parachuted safely and were captured by a Soviet patrol boat.

Nikita Khrushchev had his own self-serving version in his memoirs:
"Some U.S. reconnaissance planes were flying over our northern territorial waters, collecting intelligence on our radar installations along the Arctic Circle. We shot one of them down. The American practice in such cases was to announce that their plane had been flying over international waters. But of course, they had no way of proving their claim, and we had concrete proof that the opposite was true. Some of the crew members had been killed, but one or two were captured alive. We returned the corpses to the U.S. immediately, but the survivors we held. Other than that case, the U.S. ceased to violate our airspace...."

Oieg Penkovskiy was a high-level Soviet military official at that time as well as an American spy. Shortly after his capture in the early 1960s a document purporting to be his journal was published in the West. His account of the KB-47 incident was entirely different from Khrushchev's and was consistent with the U.S. claim that it had scrupulously avoided Soviet airspace this time.
p. 42 ------------
"The U.S. aircraft RB-47 shot down on Khrushchev's order was not flying over Soviet territory; it was flying over neutral waters. Pinpointed by radar, it was shot down by Khrushchev's personal order. When the true facts were reported to Khrushchev, he said: "Well done, boys, keep them from flying even close...." I know for a fact that our military
leaders had a note prepared with apologies for the incident, but Khrushchev said: "No, let them know that we are strong."

Almost twenty years later, on April 20, 1978, another tragic shooting incident occurred in the same area when an errant Korean Air Lines 707 strayed over the Kola Peninsula and was attacked, arguably without proper warning, by Soviet jets.

No satisfactory explanation for the course deviation of Flight 902 has ever been produced, the result in no small part of the Soviet refusal to release any of the recovered data, such as flight recorders and the pilots' and navigator's logs (the Soviets even refused to allow the pilots to make photocopies before leaving Moscow for home). Years later the Soviets released a map (almost certainly based on analysis of flight recorder data) which showed that the aircraft had begun a wide right turn soon after reaching Iceland on its Amsterdam to Anchorage over-the-pole route. Such a turn was too gradual to occur
manually, and the on-board guidance equipment would have equally been unable to match it deliberately, so a plausible explanation involved a drift in the aircraft's inertial platform or the manual keyboard entry of an incorrect correction factor for Earth's rotation (the apparent path would have been followed if the sign of the correction factor had been reversed).

Soon after entering Soviet airspace, the airliner was met by a Soviet jet. The pilot of Flight 902, Captain Kim Chang Ky, reported that when he caught sight of' the Soviet jet -- off the right side, not the left as specified by International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO, pronounced eye-kay-oh) standards -- he reduced speed, lowered his landing gear, and flashed his navigation lights on and off, all specified in procedures as signifying willingness to follow the Soviet fighter. His calls on 121.5 were recorded by a Finnish air traffic control tower at Rovaniemi, which also noted the lack of any Soviet calls
on the same frequency.

Despite the existence of the Finnish tapes, a Soviet spokesman
p. 43---------
later still declared: "The Soviet Union did everything possible to land it at an airfield but it would not comply." At that point the Soviet jet fired a missile which blew off part of a wing and showered the fuselage with shrapnel, killing two passengers. Pravda later called it a "warning shot."

American intelligence units in Europe had been able to eavesdrop on the Soviet air-to-ground communications as they occurred via some new high-tech eavesdropping facilities, according to a recent book by Seymour Hersh. At first the Russian pilots were convinced by the size of the radar blip that the incoming aircraft was a Boeing 747 and thus obviously a civilian airliner. But then at one point one of the pilots correctly
reported that its silhouette was that of a Boeing 707, the same design as the RC-135 intelligence aircraft. The pilot was then ordered to attack and destroy the target.

Remarkably, the pilot argued with his ground control, on the basis of a closer view which showed the Korean Air Lines logo on the aircraft's tail. For several minutes he protested that the airplane was not a military one. Hersh's sources reconstructed the conversation as follows:
CONTROLLER: Do you see the target?
PILOT: Roger, it is a civilian airliner.
CONTROLLER: Destroy the target.
PILOT: Did YOU understand me!
CONTROLLER: Destroy the target.
PILOT: [Swears], do you understand what I told you?
GENERAL: [Identifies himself], do you know who I am!
PILOT: Yes.
GENERAL.: Force down that plane.
The Soviets evidently decided that the markings were false, painted onto a spy plane for-just the purpose of confusing their pilots.

One eavesdropping American, recalling the tone of the pilot's voice, later described the conversation as "one of the most dramatic things I'd heard in years.... I could see the guy
shaking his head and saying 'We don't shoot down civilians.' " But he followed orders. His first missile did not detonate but his second blew up against the airliner's left wing.

Following the air-to-air- attack came the most embarrassing part of the incident, as far as the Soviet air defense forces were
p. 44 --------------
concerned. With air streaming out through holes in his fuselage, the Korean pilot pushed his jet over into a steep dive to get to a lower altitude with breathable air density. In doing so, he vanished into a low-lying cloud bank and dropped below Soviet radar coverage. The pursuing jets overshot him and were unable to spot him when they circled back. The Soviet radar screens were masked with ground clutter. The target had eluded them!

For more than an hour Captain Kim flew at an altitude of only several thousand feet across the snow-covered peninsula, seeking a safe landing place. The Soviets had no idea where he was. He had aborted several approaches to possible sites when he spotted obstructions at the last moment. Finally, after nightfall, he found a frozen lake bed, just west of Kem, and let down smoothly, skidding in to a safe landing.

Meanwhile, both overhead and at ground control points, the Soviets frantically sought out the escaped target. Hours later, responding to a phone call from a nearby Soviet settlement, Russian militia officials with a ladder knocked at the side of the airliner. The target had been found, no thanks to high-tech air defense equipment.

The incompetent performance of the air defense technology scandalized the Soviet government. Little concern seems to have been wasted on the two dead passengers. Instead, the fear was that American spy planes or even bombers might be able to utilize similar techniques against Soviet weaknesses to penetrate defenses. The air defense forces underwent a severe reorganization, and in the shakeup many leading officials had their careers terminated.

The result of the 1978 shakeup may have been a military organizati6n much more eager to shoot to kill at the earliest opportunity lest their marginal technological capabilities not allow them a second chance at any future "target." With more confidence in their ability to find and track intruders, Soviet military leaders might have been less trigger-happy. But after 1978 all the officers of the air defense forces must have been grimly determined not to let the next intruder slip away so easily.

The Soviet failure to cooperate with international investigators in 1978, and Moscow's refusal to turn over the necessary data, also clearly laid groundwork for later tragedy. Commen-
p. 45-----------
taters at that time warned about precisely such a danger. "If even deadlier incidents are to be avoided," wrote Anthony Paul in Reader's Digest, "the Russians owe it to the world to make the [flight] recorder available, and to publish a full, factual account of what they believe happened." Soviet failure to comply with ICAO standards in investigating the 1978 incident were a direct contributory precursor to the later tragedies.

At the other end of the Soviet Union, along the Pacific coast, American patrol aircraft had also been doing their share toward making Soviet border defense forces jumpy. Regular patrolling for decades, including airspace violations both planned and unplanned, had been punctuated by occasional shooting incidents. As early as October 22, 1949, an RB-29 over the Sea of Japan was attacked (no injuries). On October 7, 1952, an RB-29 was shot down by Soviet fighters six miles north of the Hokkaido coast, killing all eight crewmen. Another RB-29 was destroyed on July 29, 1953, killing another sixteen crewmen. On September 4, 1954, a U.S. Navy (USN) Neptune reconnaissance aircraft was attacked by a Soviet Mig-15, allegedly fifty miles off the coast, and on November 7 of the same year a U.S. Air Force (USAF) B-2S equipped with photoreconnaissance gear with eleven men on board was shot down "near Hokkaido" (ten men survived on parachutes). Subsequent shooting incidents resulted in no additional deaths.

There was one unusual case in which the Soviets did admit they made a mistake. On June 23, 1955, a U.S. Navy aircraft was attacked over international waters near the Bering Strait. Three crewmen were wounded. The Soviets admitted the error and offered to pay half the damage cost. The United States accepted. By today's official Soviet accounts, the last such mistake they made was thirty years ago.

Hersh's 1986 book on the 1983 KAL 007 tragedy provided information on a hitherto secret incident on April 2, 1976, near Sakhalin Island. A fully marked Japanese P-2V Neptune patrol plane inadvertently penetrated a few miles into Soviet airspace
and was pounced on by a Soviet Sukhoi 15 jet, whose pilot reported to the ground that he had "visually sighted the target." He was ordered to attack and subsequently fired two
air-to-air missiles. Both fortunately missed, and the Japanese aircraft was not damaged.

All these incidents were only preludes to the worst air-
p. 46------------------
tragedy of the Soviet borders, the destruction of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983, with the loss of 269 lives. Although the Soviets claimed complete justification, while many Western groups saw it as a deliberate Communist atrocity, careful reconstruction of the incident makes it appear instead to be the worst foul-up of Soviet air defense technology in USSR history. The ultimate guilt is unavoidable: The Soviets shot to kill, all right, but irresponsibly they weren't careful to determine at whom they were shooting. All their expensive equipment and operators never provided data sufficiently convincing to dissuade them from their original instinctive (and wrong) judgment that the blip was an "American aggressor."

The bare facts of the September 1, 1983, KAL 007 disaster have been established, despite attempts by the Soviets and some assorted Western conspiracy enthusiasts to deflect responsibility. As with many airliners before and since, Flight 007 went off course through some unlikely but plausible combination of human errors and equipment problems. Tragically the accidental course deviation put it over Soviet territory.

The Soviets had numerous opportunities to identify the "bogey" as a lost civilian airliner but were unable to fulfill their responsibilities. As the airliner crossed the Kamchatka Peninsula, Soviet interceptors failed to reach it and make visual contact. Later, over Sakhalin Island, the Soviet pilots also nearly missed their intercept. When they finally caught up, there were only minutes remaining before the plane exited Soviet airspace.
In the rush the Soviet pilot let off a burst of cannon fire from a position-behind and below the "target," where it was physically impossible for the Koreans to see it. No radio calls were heard by anyone in the area on the specified distress frequency of 121.5 megahertz. At one point the Russian pilot was abreast of (and a bit below) the airliner, but despite earlier experience with American RC-135s, he failed to notice -- or report -- the obvious visual differences (mostly in the running lights). This was especially true since the airliner's lights were flashing brightly, hardly the behavior of a stealthy intruder (to refute
this obvious deduction, the Soviets later merely lied about the plane's flying "without lights").

With the border approaching and without ever having performed a proper communications procedure, the Soviets fell into the same routine as they had with the lost Argentine
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airliner two years earlier. The pilot, call sign "805," followed in the tradition of Kulyapin, Vegin, Yeliseyev, and nameless others. When in doubt, attack to kill. Don't let the "enemy" escape.

And that, horribly, is just what happened. Amazingly there were many people in the West who were surprised. Predictable, too, were the impassioned pronouncements that the Soviets must have known they were killing innocents when another appalling interpretation was that they didn't know--or care--at whom they were shooting, even though they should have been able to determine the aircraft's innocence. Presumption of guilt is easier and safer, at least from the Soviet point of view.

With KAL 007 and the other incidents, a pattern of Soviet claims is apparent. How is a dispassionate observer able to gauge the reliability of Soviet accounts when its side usually has the only surviving witnesses?

Survivors of Flight 902 over the Kola Peninsula in 1978 did provide firsthand accounts that were markedly at variance with the official Soviet descriptions. And another recent border incident gave a similar opportunity to compare and contrast Moscow's accounts with the recollections of non-Soviet witnesses.

In July 1983 the Greenpeace antiwhaling group sent its ship Rainbow Warrior to a Soviet whaling station on the Chukchi Peninsula at the far eastern edge of Siberia. Several of the group landed by small motorboat and were distributing literature to Soviet whalers when military units arrived. One American headed back to the ship in the motorboat, carrying the camera with exposed film showing the group's activities.

The official Soviet TASS dispatch on July 21 claimed that the main ship fled at once and "made dangerous maneuvers, deliberately creating a shipwreck situation. ... The small] boat ... capsized as a result of such irresponsible actions. The possible tragic consequences were averted by Soviet frontier guards which raised a helicopter into the air and saved the drowning man."

This official Soviet scenario is a self-serving series of lies from beginning to end. As recounted by Greenpeace participants later, the helicopter itself was chasing the man in the motorboat as he tried to reach the ship. After making several menacing swoops, it lowered a line into his boat, "inviting" him aboard.
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Quickly he removed the film from his camera and left it in the boat, then put the boat's tiller hard over as he let himself be hauled up into the helicopter. Others aboard the Rainbow Warrior saw the motorboat running in circles and steered toward it; one man was injured when he successfully managed to jump on board, bring the boat under control, and retrieve the film. The Rainbow Warrior headed out to sea without interference, leaving several of its crew in Soviet custody.

The photographs retrieved from the boat were widely published around the world. The photographs showed the illegal whaling station the Russians had insisted did not exist. They showed the outdoor boilers for rendering the whale fat. They showed Greenpeacers handing out antiwhaling leaflets to puzzled and resentful Russian workers. The existence of the photographs was documentary proof of the falsity of the Soviet account (none of the Greenpeacers taken into Soviet custody was allowed to keep any exposed film). The captives were treated well and were turned over to Western authorities a few days later.

The number of times the Soviets have resorted to deadly force after botching intercept and communications attempts is appalling. In fact, the last "successful" (that is, nonfatal) intercept of an intruding aircraft seems to have been in 1968, when a chartered Seaboard World Airways DC-8 was diverted to a Soviet field in the Kuril Islands (the pilot still maintains he wasn't in Soviet airspace but prudently went along with the fighters off his wing).

Regarding disasters on their borders, the Soviets showed unusually extreme levels of falsification and fabrication of events, more so than in other kinds of disasters. Presumably the shrill tone of these is to justify the actions of their military forces. Secrecy has always been much more rigid when related to military than to civilian disasters. As for how effective glasnost will be in any future military border disasters, only time will tell. So far Western analysts believe that the Soviet military has not responded enthusiastically to glasnost or any other Gorbachev reform.

However, since these tragedies there has been one encouraging event. One airliner did cross the Soviet border in an unscheduled manner recently and was not shot down.
In late 1986 a Kuwaiti airliner, en route from Damascus to
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Teheran, safely made an emergency landing in Yerevan when a sudden storm shut down all airfields in Iran. The Boeing 727 had turned around and was headed back west but was too short of fuel to reach any airfields in Turkey. The crew desperately radioed to the Soviet air traffic control facility in Armenia. Once permission had been granted, the airliner crossed the Soviet border near Dzhulfa (less than 100 miles from where the
Argentine airliner had been destroyed six years earlier) and made a safe landing at Yerevan. The plane was serviced and fueled and took off the following morning.

Full details never became clear, and several reports described how the airliner had crossed the border while being pursued by unidentified jet fighters. There must have been dfficulty in the civil air traffic control officials contacting military air defense officers on such short notice. But the bottom line was that an airliner abruptly entered Soviet airspace, bet its life on Soviet radio technology, and this time survived.

Whether this was a fluke or a softening of the traditional bloody border policy, the future will reveal. When Mathias Rust flew his borrowed Cessna 172 from Finland to Moscow's Red Square in May 1987, he apparently owed his life to indecision and reluctance to fire on the part of at least two Soviet interceptor pilots who had shadowed him. The most tragic aftermath of Rust's stupid stunt would be a rebirth of Soviet border paranoia and trigger-happiness, ensuring that the next airborne intruders, either innocently lost or gleefully copycatting Rust's exploit, will pay with their lives. In terms of secrecy, the issue may boil down to whether the West notices the shootdown (particularly if there are Western citizens aboard) at all; if not, the Soviets can be counted on to try to keep such bloody border atrocities secret, or failing that, to creatively rearrange reality to fit Soviet preconceptions and propaganda needs.

On the border, that's the lesson of the past and the trend of the future.