United States Senate Staff Report 'Soviet Space Programs, 1966-70'

United States Senate Staff Report 'Soviet Space Programs, 1966-70'

Staff report prepared for the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences for the United States Senate. It was produced in 1971 for the 92^nd Congress under the leadership of Dr Charles S. Sheldon II. It formed part of a series of public, factual reports produced by the Library of Congress to keep the U.S. Congressional Committee informed of developments in space.

This report from 1971 is a wide ranging focus on the Soviet Space program during the period 1966-70. Pages 127-8 reference the Kettering Grammar School discovering the Plesetsk Soviet launch site. It states that although Western Governments were aware of the existence of Plesetsk, it was the Kettering Grammar School that made ‘the first widespread public disclosure of this base’.

Geoffrey Perry and Derek Slater had been tracking Soviet space activity with basic equipment at the Kettering Grammar School, using students to assist them. During the course of tracking Cosmos 112 and Cosmos 129, Perry discovered that these two satellites must have been launched somewhere other than the previously used Baikonur Cosmodrome. He managed to pinpoint the location to the south of Archangel at Plesetsk and revealed this information through two letters he sent to the UK magazine Flight International.

Despite this fact when the CIA vetted an earlier report compiled by Sheldon in 1967, they asked him to remove references to Plesetsk due to its classification as ‘Secret’. In response to this Sheldon tipped off the Washington Post about the existence of Perry’s letters to Flight International, which lead to Perry and the Kettering Grammar School becoming a global news story. This allowed Sheldon to publish the details of Plesetsk in his 1967 report and in this 1971 report he retained the reference to Kettering Grammar School’s involvement in the section on ‘Launch Sites in the Soviet Union’.