[FPSPACE] NIIAO Almaz Control Panels Site (WOW!)

[DwayneDay]

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Oberg <joberg at houston.rr.com>

>Thanks, Dave and Yuri, this is amazing stuff, from a military
>manned space program -- "Salyut"-Almaz from the 1970's, a program
>that once was super-Soviet-state-secret, and they spent a lot of
>effort disguising it and lying about it. The film-return system was 
>secret until hardware was sold at sotheby's a decade ago. We've 
>only recently learned about the machine gun that was mounted on Salyut-3.  

>See http://www.astronautix.com/craft/almazops.htm and also
>http://www.astronautix.com/craft/almzops2.htm for what we now know 
>about these programs, thanks to our Russian colleagues.

It is a pretty amazing amount of detail.

It is worth noting that the NIIAO site itself cites FP's own Asif Siddiqi, who wrote about Almaz for JBIS.

The American counterpart to Almaz, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, remains an enigma.  There have been quite a few articles written about it, but I have been told by at least one person who had knowledge of it that the real story of MOL still remains shrouded in secrecy.  I have managed to acquire a large collection of documents on the early years of the project, but it appears that around 1965 or so MOL became a top secret program with an operational (as opposed to experimental) reconnaissance mission at its core.  (One document that I have somehow misplaced dated from late 1964 and lamented that after a year of work, the Air Force had been unable to "move the program off dead center."  My guess is that it was around this time that USAF began to approach the NRO about getting involved in the project.)  So it appears as if the MOL that everybody has written about is the pre-1965 MOL, and the MOL that they were actually building was significantly different.  

Someone told me that a detailed program history of MOL exists, but the agency that owns the history refuses to acknowledge its existence.  I do not understand the logic behind this extreme secrecy, but such decisions do not have to be logical.  There is apparently substantial opposition within the US government to declassifying post-CORONA reconnaissance systems, even if they never flew.


>I hope somebody saves this NEW valuable data, since I'm beginnning to worry
that Russian law enforcement may soon again consider such information
"secret", and prosecute those who distribute it. Ditto a lot of material in
NK, such as the 'Astrofizika' satellite story recently cited in Jonathan's
Space Report; it also potentially falls within the range of 'state security'.

>I base these anxieties on recent legal activity against other
Russian researchers and scholars [do a google search on the
lamentable expereineces of Valentin Danilov]. It doesn't matter if 

Unfortunately, I share your concern.  The recent decree about what language is not acceptable on Russian television is not a good sign.




DDAY