THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES AND ITS RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS

Whereas in the US the National Academy of Sciences is an advisory body to the government, the Soviet Academy of Sciences had governmental and implementation roles. It was integral to the Party, and made decisions on the worthiness of proposed space projects, approving those to be undertaken. However, the Ministry of Machine Building allocated the funding for these projects. The President of the Academy, Mstislav Keldysh, was a powerful and highly influential figure in the Soviet space program during his tenure. Before he became President of the *Acadcmy in 1961, he was head of the Institute of Applied Mathematics (TPM) and kept this position until his death in 1978, when IPM was named the Keldysh Institute. It played a major role in space navigation and mission design.

Also unlike in the US, where university laboratories and NASA’s various field centers prepared scientific experiments for planetary missions, in the USSR the research institutes of the Academy of Sciences filled this role. These institutes were established by the Academy, but were funded through MOM. In the early years, the leading player was the Vernadsky Institute, more formally known as the Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry. In 1965, at about the same time as Korolev transferred the robotic program to NPO-Lavochkin, the Soviet Academy of Sciences under Keldysh’s initiative established the Institute for Space Research (IKI; Institut Kosmicheskikh Issledovanii), which gradually built up its role in scientific missions, including providing flight instruments, and by the 1970s was a fierce competitor to Vernadsky. With Roald Sagdeev’s appointment as Director in 1973, IKI assumed scientific leadership of deep space missions. After Sagdcev quit in 1988. Vernadsky shared leadership under Valery Barsukov until the latter died in 1992. Today IKI is the leading space science institution. The institutes develop flight instruments and NPO-Lavochkin is responsible for the spacecraft and operations.