Racing to Win the Heavens

By Richard Lacayo. Reported by Jerry Hannifin /Washington and Nancy Tracer/Moscow

Well-funded Soviet cosmonauts rack up a string of triumphs

The Soviet TV commentator was clearly excited. "The parachute is coming down, coming down!" he repeated rapidly. "Coming down!" Beneath the plume of a red-and-white chute one morning last week, a capsule drifted earthward carrying three cosmonauts, Leonid Kizim, 43, Vladimir Solovyev, 38, and Oleg Atkov, 35, to the arid steppes of Soviet Kazakhstan. The triumphant trio, who had been aloft since last February aboard an orbiting Soviet space station, were the possessors of a new space endurance record: a 237-day spin through the heavens.* A more important trophy was the cache of information gathered from experiments run on board their trailer-size Salyut 7 to determine the effects of prolonged weightlessness. This knowledge, Soviet scientists believe, should prove invaluable in Moscow's efforts to place a giant permanent station in space.

Salyut 7 is the latest in a series of sophisticated laboratories that the Soviets have put into orbit since 1971. Last February the three cosmonauts made a rendezvous with Salyut only one day after taking off in a Soyuz T-10 rocket from the Tyuratam space center in Kazakhstan. To maintain muscle strength during their long mission, the crew not only exercised regularly but spent part of each day in tight, constraining suits that forced their lungs and hearts to work harder. Still, when they landed last Tuesday, Soviet television showed them looking tired, with dark circles under their eyes. The most alert and healthy-looking was Atkov, a cardiologist who had kept close watch on the condition of his crewmates. Mission Commander Kizim and Engineer Solovyev looked pale and haggard, but happy to be home. "We feel well," insisted Kizim, lying back in a chair.

During the mission, Salyut linked twice with Soyuz "ferries" that carried two visiting crews up and then back down again. The visitors chalked up a few firsts of their own. One craft, launched in April, carried the first Indian space traveler, Rakesh Sharma, who performed yoga exercises on board. A July ship brought Svetlana Savitskaya, who had been aloft in 1982 and this time became the first woman to walk in space: she spent three hours outside her Soyuz capsule testing a welding device. Two of the Salyut 7 crew did a five-hour space walk to replace a faulty valve assembly on the main propulsion engine. Says one admiring NASA official of the complex repair chore: "It was one helluva job to do, but the Soviets did it."

The landing of the Salyut 7 descent module last week took place only days before the successful launch of the 13th U.S. shuttle mission. Challenger soared off its pad at Kennedy Space Center carrying a record seven passengers. Among its crew are two women: Kathryn Sullivan, who is scheduled this week to become the first American woman to walk in space, and Sally Ride, the first U.S. female astronaut. Also aboard is Marc Garneau, the first Canadian astronaut, an engineer who will study the damage done to Canadian lakes by acid rain. Within hours after the launch, Ride commanded the shuttle's robot arm to release a $40 million heat-sensing satellite that will aid long-range weather forecasting. The crew unfolded the shuttle's 35-ft. radar antenna, which will collect topographical information over 10% of the earth's surface.

While the U.S. shuttle coursed through its eight-day mission, the Soviets were marking a significant space anniversary. It was on Oct. 4, 1957, that Sputnik, the world's first man-made satellite, was launched, its thin, metallic beep announcing that the space age had begun. Since then, the Soviets have scored a notable string of other cosmic firsts: the first animal in space (a dog), the first man, the first woman. The first space walk was taken by a cosmonaut. The first pictures of the moon's hidden side were shot by an orbiting Soviet camera. The first simultaneous launch of two manned flights and the first three-man craft were also Soviet accomplishments.

The U.S. produced its own string of successes: the first 3 manned voyages to and from the moon in 1969, 1971 and 1972; the unmanned landing on Mars in 1976; and Pioneer 10, the first man-made object to leave the solar system, in 1972. But by 1975, the American commitment to space travel had begun to flag. In the tortoise-and-hare space competition, the methodical Soviets crept doggedly ahead, depending on incremental improvements in tried-and-true technologies, rather than the explosive leaps that have characterized American scientific and engineering advances in space.

Moscow now directs the world's largest space project.

Its cosmonauts have logged a combined total of almost 88,000 hours in space, more than twice that of their American counterparts. The Soviets last year launched 98 spacecraft, while the rest of the world sent up 29 vehicles (22 of those were launched by the U.S.). Western intelligence sources estimate that the U.S.S.R. may spend more than $16 billion annually on its space effort, in contrast to $7 billion for the U.S.

Although a dense shroud of secrecy cloaks most of the Soviet space effort, there have been reliable reports that the program has not always run smoothly.

Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, who in 1963 became the first woman in space, was sick for most of her three days in or bit, and is reported to have panicked when she became ill. In 1970 her husband Andrian Nikolayev was one of two cosmonauts who set an 18-day space endurance record, in a craft that they could not stop from rotating, sometimes as often as one turn every six seconds. As a result, the cosmonauts on their return to earth had to be lifted from their couches and carried to an ambulance. The first Soviet space mission fatality occurred in 1967, when the returning craft of Cosmonaut Vladi mir Komarov became tangled in its reentry parachutes, and hit the ground at 400 m.p.h.

Four years later, there was an even more serious accident: three Soyuz crew men were found dead in their seats after a ruptured hatch allowed their oxygen to escape during an otherwise safe reentry.

In 1972 there were reports of an enormous but still unacknowledged disaster: a giant Soviet booster was said to have exploded on the launchpad, killing hundreds of technicians, along with high-ranking Soviet military officers.

Western experts generally agree that the Soviets still trail the U.S. in key technological areas, including electronics, microminiaturization and computers, but they are moving aggressively to catch up.

Seven years ago, an intelligence consensus placed the Soviet Union from seven to nine years behind the U.S. in advanced computer technology. Today that lag is only about three or four years. Western intelligence sources say that a determined push by the Soviets has brought them close to achieving two of their long-cherished goals: a space shuttle and a super-booster for launching huge modules that would make up a large, complex space station. American reconnaissance satellites have photographed two big new boosters on the launchpads at Tyuratam and new runways for the shuttle. A congressional study describes the Salyut missions as "the cornerstone of an official policy which looks not only toward permanent Soviet human presence in low earth orbit, but also toward permanent settlement of their people on the moon and Mars." The report warns: "The Soviets take quite seriously the possibility that large numbers of their citizens will one day live in space."

-- By Richard Lacayo.

Reported by Jerry Hannifin /Washington and Nancy Tracer/Moscow

* The old record: 211 days by Cosmonauts Anatoly Berezovnoy and Valentin Lebedev, aboard the Salyut 7 space station in 1982. The U.S. record is 84 days, set in 1974 by Astronauts Gerald Carr, Edward Gibson and William Pogue aboard Skylab 3.

With reporting by Jerry Hannifin /Washington and Nancy Tracer/Moscow