Sunrise with Troika

The spaceship Sunrise that circled the earth for 24 hours last week was the first manned Russian satellite to be orbited in 16 months. But the long, launchless period had been a busy one: the Sunrise flight was eloquent technical testimony to the accomplishments of Soviet space scientists. Items: > The capsule was first to carry more than one passenger. Its three-man crew was a sure promise of multiman space stations.

> The crew contained the first trained scientists ever to venture into space.

> The space suits of earlier astronauts were conspicuous by their absence. The Sunrise crew members were protected only by their pressurized cabin.

> The capsule, with its passengers still inside, made a soft landing on solid ground with the help of retrorockets.

None of these feats have yet been accomplished by the lagging U.S. space program. Yet for all the novelty the flight involved, from the moment the tall, silver-sided rocket with its over sized new space capsule left the launching pad in Kazakhstan, all seemed to go well. The commander radioed that all three passengers were in good shape, that all equipment was working normally. Soon the smiling faces of two of the cosmonauts appeared on live TV. While orbiting over the U.S., where their craft was tracked by U.S. radars, they radioed good wishes "to the industrious American people." It Pays to Believe. U.S. space scientists had nothing but congratulations for the Russian feat. But a definitive judgment cannot be made with confidence because the Russians have so far concealed most of the facts on which scientific assessment could be based. And as a result of that secrecy, a few sour notes were inevitable. From Switzerland, West Germany and Britain came reports that the Russians had intended a much longer flight: that communications difficulties, the illness of a passenger, or the malfunctioning of a second-stage rocket had forced the Sunrise down prematurely. Senator Clinton Anderson, chairman of the Senate Space and Aeronautics Committee, said he knew the shot was coming and had expected the orbiting to last a week.

Soviet reporters who got a look at the Sunrise were heavy on its interior decoration and light on its technology. The ship is lined, they said, with "a snow-white, soft, spongelike synthetic fabric." The three seats are close together in a row. The single instrument panel has a clock, a globe showing the spaceship's position, a radio, a telegraph key and many switches and buttons.

Improved Vostok. All of which is little help in deciding whether the Sunrise was entirely new or merely an improved version of the standard one-man Vostok-type spaceships. These are believed to weigh 10,000 Ibs., which is more than three times as much as the Mercury capsule (3,000 Ibs.) that orbited U.S. Astronaut Leroy Gordon Cooper for 34 hours and 20 minutes; they could surely be modified to hold three men for a 24-hour flight. Senator Anderson suspects that the Sunrise weighed 15,000 Ibs., but even at that weight, it could be orbited by launching rockets little different from those that the Russians have been using for years.

If Russian commentators are to be believed--and U.S. space authorities have found that it pays to believe them --the Sunrise is almost certain to have collected valuable information by orbiting a crew made up of three men of different skills. All U.S. astronauts have been test pilots with quick reactions and proven ability to cope with mechanical emergencies; since there were few emergencies, they found little that was useful to do. They did not observe much, and neither did their Russian opposite numbers.

The crew of the Sunrise probably did better. Only the commander, Colonel

Vladimir M. Komarov, 37, of the Red air force, is a pilot and trained astronaut. He was in control of the ship, and his contour seat was handiest to the instruments. Presumably he knew what to do in the unlikely event that the ship needed manual "flying" because of some malfunction of its automatic controls. Colonel Komarov has a slightly suspect heart condition, which is an indication that the Russians do not think that astronauting is a physically strenuous profession.

Beside Komarov sat Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov, 38, who is an engineer-scientist with long experience in designing spacecraft. The Russians have not described his duties, but he was surely free to observe critically and with scientific insight the behavior of the capsule and its equipment. The third crew member was Dr. Boris B. Yegorov, 27, a research physician specializing in aviation and space medicine. He is an authority on the vestibular apparatus, the delicate mechanism in the inner ear that gives humans their sense of balance and is disturbed by weightlessness. Dr. Yegorov was obviously sent along to watch with a skilled eye his own and his companions' reactions to space.

To Turn the Trick. Dr. Edward C. Welsh of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration suspects that last week's Sunrise was not the first of its type to fly. About ten days earlier the Russians orbited a satellite, Cosmos 47, that they did not describe. But U.S. observers watched it by radar and concluded that "something big" was in the offing. Dr. Welsh thinks Cosmos 47 was probably a Sunrise spaceship sent up without a crew to test its dependability.

Ships of the Sunrise class will presumably make many more trips into space. They could be used as forerunners of long-lived satellite stations, or as orbital launching platforms for shots at the moon or the planets. If fitted with the necessary control and propulsive equipment, they can be used to practice the difficult orbital-rendezvous maneuver that the U.S. Gemini Project is not expected to be ready to attempt until sometime next year. No Sunrise could carry a man all the way to the moon, says NASA, but the big spaceships are probably the best classrooms yet built in which scientists can learn to turn the trick.

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