Aeronautics & Space: Stealing the Show in Paris

AERONAUTICS & SPACE

For its part in the Paris Air Show, the U.S. went all out, displaying sophisticated aircraft and spacecraft and flying two Sikorsky jet helicopters last week from Brooklyn all the way to Le Bourget Airport—the first nonstop crossing of the North Atlantic by whirlybird (they were refueled en route). Britain and France also put their best fleet forward with striking new military and civilian aircraft and a full-scale model of their jointly developed supersonic transport, the Concorde. But it was the Russians who stole the show, simply by taking the wraps off space hardware—some of it a decade old—that they had never before displayed in the West.

The greatest Soviet surprise was the launch vehicle that in 1961 sent Pioneer Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into orbit in Vostok I. Although envious Western space experts have long assumed that a single giant booster had been used to launch Vostok and later Soviet spacecraft, the vehicle displayed at Paris consisted of a relatively small two-stage rocket surrounded by a cluster of four conical, strap-on rocket engines. Instead of achieving the major breakthrough in rocket technology believed by the West to have made the Gagarin flight possible, the Russians had simply strapped together enough smaller rocket engines to provide the necessary thrust.

Sky Spy. Visitors at the show flocked to a huge mock-up of the 13.6-ton Proton satellite, which the Russians call a scientific-research vehicle. Space experts who examined the mock-up last week were reasonably certain, however, that the Proton is a prototype of one of the sections of a manned orbital-reconnaissance vehicle or even of a lunar landing craft that will be assembled in orbit before heading to the moon. The Proton on display in Paris consists of an 8-ft -diameter core section surrounded by a 14.8-ft.-diameter outer shell that could contain instrumentation and life-support systems. U.S. space experts suggest that the outer shell could serve as a shield to protect the craft against micrometeorite hits during prolonged or biting of the earth or a lunar trip.

The Soviets also showed a model of their advanced Molniya communications satellite, which in synchronous orbit over Siberia can relay color TV between Moscow and Vladivostok. And Molniya satellites have relayed long-distance phone calls and taken weather pictures of the earth's cloud cover. Molniya was cluttered with so many unlabeled antennas and sensor systems that scientists figured that the satellite was also capable of serving a "spy in the sky" function over the U.S.