Apr 9 1985
From The Space Library
In remarks at a meeting marking the 25th anniversary of the Gagarin Space Training Centre, Gen. Georgiy Beregovoy, center commander, said that it had become an international space academy where 58 USSR cosmonauts and participants in international space programs from the socialist countries and from France and India trained, FBIS, Tass in English reported.
Beregovoy also said results of space research were used in virtually every sector of the national economy, with more than 800 USSR institutions and organizations using the research results. He said that during missions, cosmonauts were concerned with problems of agriculture; radio and electronics engineering; metallurgy; welding; studies of sea currents, offshore areas, and bottom sedimentation in river estuaries; and compiling maps of shoals and coastal areas.
In other remarks at the meeting, Leonid Kizim, a participant in the longest space mission, which had lasted 237 days, said that during its 25 years the training center had become a major research institution capable of resolving most of the USSR's complex scientific and technical problems. (FBIS, Tass in English, Apr 9/85)
NASA announced that the Space Shuttle Carrier Aircraft's (SCA) functional check flight was successfully flown today following engine repairs made in accordance with specifications. The SCA would fly the Atlantis orbiter to Kennedy Space Center on April 12, with one refueling stop. (NASA Daily Activities Report, Apr 11/85)
Hans Mark, former NASA deputy administrator, Ames Research Center director, and Secretary of the Air Force, on April 9, during part of an MIT dinner lecture series, disparaged government attempts to commercialize space, the Space Commerce Bulletin reported. "Now that I'm out of government, 1 can say that I found nothing funnier than bureaucrats wringing their hands in town around here about how to commercialize something where most of them, myself included, don't have the slightest idea on how to make investments, how to judge markets, how to do all those things that are important for commercialization," Mark said.
He characterized commercial space efforts as being politically popular but backed with little substance, with much of his criticism directed at private sector remote sensing and expendable launch vehicle operations. He said he didn't believe either technology would be a commercial success in the U.S., and he predicted private Space Shuttle operation would never work.
Mark considered true commercial space activity to be technology transfer programs and government-industry relations as set up in the 1950s to build hardware for government programs. He added, however, that government couldn't take credit for technology transfer as being space commercialization because that was not what "intellectuals think commercialization means and we need to do other things. So we need to hire 50 people in NASA headquarters to do commercialization." Regarding the impact of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) on commercial space, Mark said, "There's no doubt in my mind that important commercial ventures will follow from SDI simply because of the nature of the contractor systems that we use. We will build high-intensity lasers and the first commercial application of those lasers will surely be in welding or in something like that . . . That's what I like to call the commercialization of space," Mark concluded. (Space Commerce Bulletin, Apr 26/85, 1)
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