Soviet Space: A Visit to Star City

In contrast to NASA's open-door policies, the Soviet Union has always guarded its manned space program with military-like secrecy. Flights are rarely announced beforehand. Failures are either ignored or categorically denied.

Even launch and training sites have been largely out of bounds for Western journalists. Now, as part of the growing scientific cooperation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the Kremlin is be ginning to raise the curtain slightly. Several American correspondents, including TlME's Moscow Bureau Chief John Shaw and Washington-based Aerospace Reporter Jerry Hannifin, have recently been allowed to visit Zvezdnoy Gorodok -- Star City -- the Soviet Union's cosmonaut-training complex 40 miles northeast of Moscow. Their report:

The pastoral setting is deceptive.

Hidden away behind the high green fences and thick belts of trees, the compound--with its acres of lush lawns, gleaming silver birches, dark pines and carefully tended beds of flowers--looks like a weekend hideaway for members of the Soviet elite. But there are no rustic dachas (summer homes). Instead, the tranquil enclave is filled with space-age hardware: laboratories, giant centrifuges and flight simulators.

Unlike the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where major retrenchments are under way, Star City is rapidly expanding--a sure sign of the Soviet Union's continued dedication to the exploration of space. The original compound of bungalow-style stucco buildings, where Yuri Gagarin and other early cosmonauts trained, is now being replaced by a sprawling modernistic community, including balconied apartment houses, schools, libraries and a sports stadium, as well as tennis courts, soccer fields and other athletic facilities. "The population keeps growing," says Major General Vladimir Shatalov, director of cosmonaut training at Star City. "Now we've got about 3,000 people, including the wives and kids of space workers. We've even got a kindergarten population problem."

Big as it is, Star City is only part of the Soviet space plant. In contrast to Houston, it does not have control of spacecraft during flights. Mission controllers are stationed at the Tyuratam launch site -- equivalent to Cape Kennedy -- which is located some 1,600 miles away in Kazakhstan. Nonetheless, Star City's role is extremely important.

It is where all manned flights begin and end, including training, medical preparations and postflight debriefings. "All of us [cosmonauts] started from Star City," recalled Shatalov, a veteran of three orbital missions.

Americans will soon participate in those activities. Rising along the banks of a pretty artificial lake are quarters that will be occupied by U.S. astronauts when they come to Star City to train with their Soviet counterparts for the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz linkup. Shatalov thinks that the Americans will like their surroundings. "This is a healthful, quiet and serious place for training," he said. Then, he added, amiably, "just like Houston."

Soviet space officials share the enthusiasm of NASA's leadership for the new partnership and hope that it will lead to growing Soviet-American cooperation in the cosmos. Reflecting this mood, Shatalov had only praise for the American astronauts who have already visited Star City and those he met on his trip to Houston. "They are learning Russian, and we are learning your language," he beamed, giving especially good marks to Tom Stafford, commander of the American crew for the 1975 mission: "Stafford is one of the fast learners in Russian. He keeps saying 'No, no, nyet problem.' "

High Standard. Like American astronauts, the Soviet spacemen spend many hours in jet trainers. Indeed, the only real noise we heard at Star City was the occasional sound of Czechoslovak-built L-39 jets circling overhead like hawks. But the cosmonauts do their most important flying on the ground. As he led us off to the big hourglass-shaped Soyuz simulator, where the cosmonauts learn how to handle the basic ship of the Soviet space program, Shatalov conceded that the machine did not "look so impressive from the outside as the Houston simulator." But he pointed out that its interior controls are more than adequate for the job. They include a computer-driven viewing screen that shows a cosmonaut exactly what he might see in space.

The docking simulator, in which cosmonauts practice the fine art of approaching another ship in space, is more complex. It consists of side-by-side models of a Soyuz and a larger Salyut space station, mounted on parallel tracks. Seated at controls in darkened cabins off to the side, cosmonauts look at the models via TV cameras and can maneuver them to duplicate the actual movements of rendezvous and docking. Both Stafford and Apollo II's Neil Armstrong have tried their hand at the Soviet simulator and easily mastered its nuances. "That shows the simplicity of our docking method," Shatalov said, "and also their high standard of training."

During the tour, Shatalov was alternately communicative and evasive. He parried questions about reports printed in the West that the Soviet Union has suffered several recent failures in space, including major problems with its latest Salyut (TIME, May 28): "Unfortunately, I do not read English very well, so I have no idea what is being written about these allegations." But Shatalov explained in new detail the cause of death of three Soviet cosmonauts on their return from a 24-day flight in 1971. During re-entry into the earth's atmosphere, he explained, a latch opened in the hatch of the Soyuz spacecraft that was carrying the cosmonauts back to earth. That resulted in a rapid loss of pressure, depriving the crew of oxygen. "What happened was bad luck, sheer chance," Shatalov said. He added that the mechanisms involved had since been completely redesigned. "It was not a crew failure."

His words were perhaps intended to allay any fears in the American space community of a similar accident during the Apollo-Soyuz linkup, when there will be a brief exchange of crew members between the two ships. In fact, Shatalov did his best to emphasize the similarities rather than differences in the U.S. and Russian approach to manned space flight. That includes a preference for jet pilots as spacecraft commanders (though engineers and scientists may be crew members). "Training is shaped by requirements, just as the shape of an aircraft is decided by its speed," Shatalov said. In Houston, he recalled, he watched Astronaut Rusty Schweickart and the back-up Skylab 1 crew don their pressure suits, practice injection into orbit and docking with the big space station in a simulator. "It was the same as we simulate here, not more, not less," said Shatalov. "We are treading the same paths."

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