A Russian Success

"Hey," asked Cosmonaut Vladislav Volkov, 35, "do you see what he's doing?" Before mission control could answer, Volkov's commander, Lieut. Colonel Georgy Dobrovolsky, 43, appeared on Moscow TV screens. He was playfully floating on his back in the zero gravity of space and pumping his legs as if he were pedaling a bicycle. Then, while all Russia watched, Volkov accidentally released a picture of Lenin, letting the father of the Soviet state drift aimlessly around the spacecraft.

Orbital Acrobatics. If the behavior of the three cosmonauts aboard the Soviet Union's huge Salyut spacecraft last week seemed exuberant, there was good reason. In the past few weeks the Soviet space program has enjoyed a remarkable string of successes. Even while the cosmonauts performed their orbital acrobatics, the rugged little unmanned Russian moon rover, Lunokhod, came back to life and resumed its patrols for the eighth consecutive two-week-long lunar day. Farther out in space, two Russian spacecraft were racing their smaller American counterpart, Mariner 9, to the planet Mars. But the attention of the world was focused on the orbiting cosmonauts and their achievement: the manning of the first experimental laboratory in orbit around the earth.

Ever since they were beaten by the U.S. in the race to land men on the moon, the Russians have been proclaiming the importance of orbiting space stations--as platforms to survey the earth, to scan the heavens and eventually to launch manned excursions to the planets. In April the Soviets lofted Salyut, an impressive, 171-ton unmanned collection of scientific instruments (telescopes, spectrometers and other sensing equipment). But the odd, tubular-shaped laboratory, with its stubby, winglike solar panels, settled into such a low initial orbit that its lifetime was reckoned at only a few weeks. Ground controllers eventually raised the orbit a bit, thereby extending Salyut's life. But the first attempt to dock a manned Soyuz with the ship ran into trouble, and the cosmonauts returned abruptly to earth.

Very Bright Flash. Last week in a second attempt to man the station, the Russians launched Soyuz 11. Equipped with improved docking mechanism, the 71-ton spaceship rendezvoused with Salyut after 24 hours. With Test Engineer Viktor Patsayer, 38, leading the way, the cosmonauts feigned surprise upon entering Salyut's large, living-room-size interior, complete with instrument panels, separate compartments, kitchen and housekeeping equipment and even a small library. "This place is tremendous," said Dobrovolsky. "There seems to be no end to it."

Besides their televised games and bantering, the cosmonauts performed more serious tasks: a number of unspecified biomedical experiments, tests of Salyut's systems and photography of the earth with an externally mounted TV camera. They also fired the space station's main engine, an operation accompanied by what Dobrovolsky described as "a very bright flash with a large number of white particles, like a snow blizzard." After two firings, they managed to raise Salyut's orbit to 161 by 175 miles. That increased elevation should give the space station at least another month's life--enough time for other Soyuz spacecraft to dock with it.

Though Salyut is only a third of the size of the proposed U.S. Skylab space station, scheduled to be launched in 1973, NASA officials were clearly impressed by the Soviet achievement. The feat stirred less comment in budget-conscious Washington. With the Apollo program coming quickly to an end--the third from last U.S. moon shot will lift off in July--Congress and the Administration seem unwilling to engage the Soviet Union in any new space races. Anticipating bigger and better Soviet space stations, U.S. space officials point out that it now seems more likely than ever that the next decade in space will go to the Russians by default.

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