Back in Orbit

Although they have been lagging badly in the space race, the Russians have not lost their flair for the dramatic. Just as a major international space conference was winding up in Leningrad last week, and U.S. Moon Walker Neil Armstrong was inspecting the cosmonauts' Star City compound outside Moscow, the Soviets launched a two-man spaceship, Soyuz 9. into orbit around the earth. On board were Vostok 3 Cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev, 40--husband of the world's only spacewoman, Valentina Tereshkova--and Rookie Vitaly Sevastyanov, 35. They were the first Russians in space since last October's triple launch of manned Soviet spacecraft.

Last week's Soyuz shot was notable for one innovation. It was the first manned nighttime launch by either the Soviet Union or the U.S. The Russians also gave wide publicity to the shot, releasing films of Soyuz atop a Vostok rocket on its prd shortly before launch. One photograph showed three service towers retracted like the unfolded petals of a gigantic flower.

Tass soon announced that Soyuz 9 was a "solitary" flight, stifling rumors that there would be an attempt to link the craft with another to form a space station (one of the unattained goals of last fall's orbital troika). But in a Pravda article, the designer of Soyuz revealed that the flight would test systems "that will be used in future spaceships and orbital stations."

At week's end, the cosmonauts reported that they were feeling well, and Soyuz 9 seemed on the way toward breaking a Soviet record for the longest manned space flight: the 5-day orbital mission of Vostok 5 in 1963.

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