TAKE 1 OF 2- -HISTORY OF RUSSIAN PHOTO-RECONNAISSANCE SATELLITES OUTLINED

• Document Type: FOIA
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 06607579
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 6
• Document Creation Date: December 28, 2022
• Document Release Date: April 12, 2017
• Case Number: F-2016-02411
• Publication Date: September 6, 2004

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WARNING: TOPIC: MILITARY
SERIAL: CEP20040716000352
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COUNTRY: RUSSIA
SUBJ: TAKE 1 OF 2--History of Russian Photo-Reconnaissance
Satellites Outlined
SOURCE: Moscow Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye in Russian 16 Jul
04
TEXT:
[Article by Konstantin Chuprin: "The Abnormal Landing At
Shirokiy Buyerak"]
[FBIS Translated Text]
Our country's first space photo-reconnaissance system was
fielded in 1964.
The establishment and development of our country's cosmonautics
is closely connected with Saratov Oblast. Satatov defense
enterprises worked on space; the Saratov land gave a ticket to the
skies to Yuriy Gagarin, who studied at the aero club here; and it
happily received him in the person of the residents of Ternovskiy
Rayon after his return from his historic flight. Balakovskiy and
Volskiy Rayons also did not stand aside from the great space era.
They also once had to meet a guest from space � true, an inanimate
guest.
The guest was a piece of a colossal part of a Soviet space
iceberg -- a military object which until recently was completely
unknown to the general public.
Here we are talking about a case well-known in the city of
Balakovo concerning the "fall of a satellite" into the Volga
between the village of Shirokiy Buyerak in Volskiy Rayon and the
current dam of the Balakovskiy Nuclear-Power Plant's cooling pond.
This happened in the spring of 1968 (there was no nuclear-power
plant there at that time). During the dawn of the unprecedented
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glasnost at the end of the 1980s-beginning of the 1990s,
journalists decided to investigate the given incident -- first from
the magazine Ogonek and then Balakovo journalists. Witnesses from
river-transport workers were found, who told about a sphere
descending to the water on a parachute and which quickly sank and
about how Caspian-Sea sailors soon arrived at the Volga and started
to search for the mysterious object. However, even chance witnesses
had no doubt about the object's space origin. However, the
journalists were unable to obtain any information about the
object's name or its purpose.
The sailors were not searching for the entire satellite in the
Volga, but for its descent module with its exposed photo film. It
was in this way that capsules from the satellite returned to Earth
on satellites after completing their espionage missions in orbit.
In the Soviet Union the development of reconnaissance satellites
was carried out simultaneously with the preparations for human
flight in space. As a result, Gagarin's ship Vostok and our first
spy satellite, the Zenit, were outwardly nearly indistinguishable.
Only instead of a cosmonaut, photo cameras SA-20 and SA-10 and the
Kust-12M electronics intelligence unit were installed in the Zenit
descent module. The Zenit was able to photograph 5.4 million square
meters of the Earth's surface during its mission. There was an
attempt to also equip these satellites with the Baykal television
surveillance device, but it turned out to be ineffective.
The Zenit-4 Unmanned Spaceship
The launching of Zenits with the help of the Vostok booster
rocket began at the Baykonur Cosmodrome in the first half of the
1960s, and in 1964 the Zenit-2 photo-reconnaissance space system
(with satellites 11F61) was officially accepted in the inventory of
the Soviet Army. Starting in 1967, these satellites were put into
orbit by Soyuz rockets from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. A total of 81
satellites of the given system were launched (the last was in May
1970), some of which were lost as a result of various technical
incidents.
(Attachment not included)
Thus, the flight of one of the Zenit-2 series which received the
pseudonym of Kosmos-216 ended unsuccessfully. Kosmos-16 with a
weight of 4,720 kg was launched on 20 April 1968 into an orbit with
the following parameters: altitude in perigee 199 km; 277 km in
apogee; inclination 51.8 degrees. Upon its return to Earth eight
days later, the descent module descended abnormally to the Volga
and sank in 42 minutes. A search-service helicopter accompanied the
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descent module until the moment of its loss.
That was the very same "Balakovo" satellite. Several witnesses
assert that an explosion sounded in the region where the device
sank. This may be the truth, since Zenit descent modules were
equipped with the APO automatic destruction device, which destroyed
the capsule to avoid its being seized by the enemy in case of an
abnormal landing. It is wholly possible that Kosmos-216's
electronic brain gave the command to self-destruct. There is
information cited in Western sources that as a result of the
Kosmos-216 incident, 85 percent of the information collected by the
satellite was lost, which means it was possible to save 15 percent?
If so, the Navy's search-and-rescue party working in the region
where the descent module fell raised something up from the bottom
of the river.
At one time rumors were going around that the "fall of the
satellite" led to the radioactive contamination of the Volga.
This, however, was only local speculation. But a "space Chemobyl"
did take place once.
The space era for the Russian nuclear industry began in the
beginning of the 1960s with the appearance of the Romashka onboard
nuclear reactor/electric generator -- the electric power source for
spacecraft. Later such work was connected with the naval
space-reconnaissance and target-indication satellite system MKRTs
BEGINNING OF SECTION 2
REF: 1. CEP20040716000352 Moscow Nezavisimoye Voyennoye
Obozreniye in Russian 16 Jul 04 ///satellite system MKRTs
SOURCE: Moscow Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye in Russian 16 Jul
04
TEXT:
Legenda, which was intended to detect the ships of a probably enemy
and provide data for our fleet to use cruise missiles against them;
in particular, the Granit PKR [anti-ship missiles] of Project 949
and 949A nuclear-powered submarines. Along with US-P (17F17)
electronics-intelligence satellites, the Legenda included US-A
(17F16) orbital radar posts, which were capable of "sniffing out"
American aircraft carriers in the ocean at any time of day and in
any weather. A nuclear power plant served as the onboard power
source of the US-A radars; this power source was created by the
Ministry of Medium Machine-Building's NPO [Scientific-Production
Association] Krasnaya Zvezda.
US-A radar reconnaissance satellites were launched from the
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Baykonur Cosmodrome with Tsiklon-2 booster rockets to an orbit of
about 280 km altitude. The most favorable operating conditions were
created at such an altitude for two-sided lateral survey radar
satellites, however the duration of the satellite's active
existence was not great. To avoid the nuclear reactor falling to
the Earth after the satellite completed its mission, the nuclear
power plant was separated from it and was thrown into a so-called
burial orbit of 1,000 km altitude.
However, there was one sad and dangerous incident in the history
of the largely successful operation of the Legenda system when a
4,300-kg satellite of the US-A series (pseudonym Kosmos-954; orbit
parameters were 259 km perigee, 277 km apogee, 65 degrees
inclination) launched on 18 September 1977 went out of control and
fell to Earth (to be more correct, its fragments fell). This
occurred on 24 January 1978; moreover, Soviet radioactive space
trash ended up scattered over northwestern Canada in an area of
several thousand square kilometers. An international scandal broke
out, and the payment to Canada of $3 million as compensation for
its expenses in conducting operation "Morning Light" to collect the
fragments and decontaminate the area can be added to the USSR's
costs for the arms race and for maintaining greedy, "progressive"
regimes throughout the world.
Later the USSR had several more incidents with the Navy's
nuclear satellites, but was able to prevent serious consequences
analogous to those which took place in the case of Kosmos-954.
However, historical primacy in space nuclear accidents does not
belong to us, but to the United States � in 1964 an American
navigation satellite with a reactor onboard was unable to make it
into orbit, but the reactor broke up into pieces in the atmosphere
along with the satellite.
[Description of Source: Moscow Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye in
Russian -- Weekly independent military newspaper published by the
Boris Berezovskiy-financed Nezavisimaya Gazetal
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