Essays. Catscan Columns

CATSCAN 14 "Memories of the Space Age"

Back in the heyday of the twentieth century, you couldn't keep a space hero out of network television or off the glossy pages of LIFE and LOOK. Nowadays LIFE and LOOK are as dead as Yuri Gagarin. Even the TV networks are assuming a rather sickly post-digital hue.

Space news out of the USSR -- a defunct entity itself looking very true to LIFE -- no longer kicks up nine-day Sputnik wonders, no longer appears in major monthlies. It's to be found instead in the workaday pages of IEEE SPECTRUM, a specialized magazine for electronics engineers.

In March 1995, longtime cosmonaut-watcher and NASA engineer James Oberg engaged in an extensive first-hand tour of the formerly Soviet launch sites and space complexes. Oberg is a recognized Soviet Space expert, somtime NOVA host on PBS, special consultant to the Sotheby's auction house for Soviet space memorabilia, and the author of the definitive tome RED STAR IN ORBIT (Random House 1981). His article appeared in the December 1995 issue of SPECTRUM.

For decades during the Cold War and Space Race, Oberg basically used the techniques of other career Kremlinologists -- rumors, defectors, body counts, overheard radio telemetry, May Day parade stands, and informed speculation.

But with the USSR defunct, Oberg simply breezed into the legendary Baikonur cosmodrome with camera, videocam and notebook in hand -- and what a story Oberg has to tell.

The Russian space centers haven't quite caught on to the unromantic fact that the century has left Khrushschev and Gagarin behind. The space facilities still boast a plethora of hammers and sickles, with the names and profiles of Lenin, Kalinin and other Old Bolsheviks. A certain nostalgia is only to be expected, as the space worker corps is littered with deadwood. Most of Russia's current top space experts are men in their 60s and 70s, a Brezhnev-style gerontocracy of rocket-science.

Many of these veteran space workers have simply outlived the Space Age. They first took up their sacred calling in the 50s and 60s, during the super-secret Sputnik and Vostok days, when technical knowledge was strictly compartmentalized and doled out on a need-to-know basis. Institutional senility is creeping in, as Oberg demonstrates with an anecdote. Last April the Mir space station cosmonauts began showing odd bits and pieces of lost hardware to ground control, asking what these gadgets were. Nobody on the ground had a clue; they couldn't recognize the gear or even guess its purpose. The machines were still in orbit, but the paper trail was gone.

The Mir space station itself is ten years old. It has had at least one fire on board. No one has any idea how to "de-orbit" the decaying station safely, but the Russians hope that American money and American technology will keep the station ru

The USSR had two major launch centers, Baikonur Cosmodrome (aka Tyuratam) and the ultra-secret Plesetsk site. Official fraud claimed that Baikonur existed some 250 kilometers away from the actual site of launches; the launches from Plesetsk were denied entirely and officially proclaimed to be UFOs.

Like a lot of Russian government military and paramilitary sites, Plesetsk hasn't been paying its power bills lately, and has sometimes had its power shut off. But Plesetsk is a thriving haven compared to Baikonur, because Plesetsk is at least within the physical territory of the Russian Federation. Baikonur/Tyuratam isn't so lucky. The launch site of Soviet ma

The site, according to Oberg (and his many fine color photos strongly back him up) is in a state of advanced decay. The water is no longer safe to drink, and runs only intermittently. Fires, explosions, and toxic leaks are common. Tumbleweeds (an Asian species) roll unimpeded through the launchpads. Many civilian workers were left unpaid for months on end, and they simply fled. Drafted militia sent in to maintain order broke into rioting and looting through the abandoned, windowless apartment blocks. There haven't been any new-hires taken on to the space enterprise in at least five years.

With the near-collapse of security, thousands of Kazakh squatters have moved in to the launch center. They're still there, defying eviction by Russian and Kazakh military cops and armied militias. The cosmic capital's thickly-strewn junk-piles, broken fencing and abandoned industrial warehousing made it a positive boon for the Kazakh refugees, peasants fleeing the ecological disaster of the poisoned Aral Sea. The streets of Baikonur are choked with blowing dust from the distant Aral salt flats. The pesticide-thickened runoff from dammed rivers ca

Amazingly, the veteran Russian space workers, on average well over 50 years old, are still launching rockets from Tyuratam. Their work has been cut back by 90 percent or so, and they're begging passers-by for ca

The Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center ("Starry Town," northeast of Moscow) now sells space-cadet dude-ranch tours to passing Europeans and Yankees, for a thousand dollars a week. European Space Agency "guest cosmonauts," shot into orbit to man the Mir station, have brought the Russians about $85 million. The Chileans, Fi

Western auction houses sell-off Soviet space vehicles and former top-secret documents for cash. Moscow still has 24 operational geostationary spacecraft, but three- fourths of them are beyond their design lifetime. The cosmonaut corps has had massive layoffs, many of them 40- to-50 year-old space heros who have been training for decades but will never have a chance to fly.

One could go on. One could, for instance, recommend the US Federal document "US-Russian Cooperation in Space" from the Office of Technology Assessment -- if the OTA itself had not been recently axed by the US Congress. The late twentieth-century US Congress is deeply unimpressed by shrieks of "Eureka" and "Excelsior" from the US scientific community -- what they want to hear are cries of "paydirt" and "competitive advantage." The Endless Frontier is out -- the Almighty Market is in.

It takes two to do a dramatic, awe-inspiring, cosmic tango. Sense of Wonder As a Foreign Policy no longer cuts any ice in Moscow or Washington. With the collapse of centrally-directed economics as a viable alternative to markets, the entire tenor of civil enterprise has changed, around the planet. It's no longer Free World Versus Communism, but McWorld Versus Jihad. Even the "Information Superhighway," the Clinton/Gore Administration's CyberSpace Race, seems to have no coherent role for any government to play. Bits of the old rhetoric are ritually deployed in Atari Democrat guise, but there is no Cyberspace NASA, no single national goal of landing in the virtual moon, nothing much for Clinton or Gore to do but gosh-wow and deplore the pornography.