But does it exist? Tesla is the future of the automotive industry

ALEXEY SMERTIN: “KOKORIN IS TALENTED. BUT DOES HE HAVE AMBITION AND MOTIVATION?

Former midfielder of Lokomotiv, Bordeaux and Chelsea, deputy executive director of Moscow Dynamo Alexey Smertin - about John Terry's jokes, the anger of Jose Mourinho, the talent of Alexander Kokorin, PSG, Monaco, the historic victory over the French and the draw with Ukrainian national team.

Interview with the newspaper L'Equipe.

Looks like you've lost weight.

I lost three kilograms and am running a marathon. My goal is to run the Berlin Marathon under three hours. Eli Bop said that I have three lungs, so I use them.

You performed in France. Are you currently following Ligue 1?

I like this championship, after all, it was thanks to it that I started playing in Europe. But compared to my time, the level of Ligue 1 has dropped, it is no longer among the tournaments that people try to watch first. This is also evidenced by the UEFA coefficient table. I don't mean PSG, this team is a special case and does not reflect the real state of affairs in French clubs. All those behind the Parisians are weaker, although Monaco, for example, managed to compete in the Champions League this year. In my time, the best players also went abroad: Thierry Henry, Robert Pires, Zinedine Zidane... But this trend has intensified and now concerns not only experienced football players.

- Monaco really brought a surprise this season.

I admire what this club is doing, don’t forget that the team rose from the second division not so long ago. Thanks to a good coach and competent managers, she has decent results. I have always liked this club, but the fact that it has a Russian owner makes it even more attractive to me. And although his strategy has changed, I think Monaco will be able to compete with PSG in the coming years. In any case, I hope that the team will at least resist him. Otherwise, the championship will quickly become uninteresting - for everyone except the Parisians, of course. In my time, Lyon always won. To make the tournament more exciting, PSG doesn't always need to win.

There have never been many Russians in France. Now, all the players of the Russian national team play in their homeland, where they have very good contracts. All other things being equal, they earn more at home, so they have no desire to leave. It’s a pity, because now they are less hungry for the game and feel great in their little world. In my opinion, experience in Europe is very good. You make an effort to learn a foreign language, you take risks... Take Kokorin: he is very talented, this is obvious. But does a great future await him? Only he has the answer, and it depends on his motivation and ambitions.

Who is the strongest player you ever played with?

John Terry. When asked this question, people often think about a striker or some kind of technical player. But Terry is a real example. What an attitude, what professionalism! He never missed a single training session the entire season, or a single match. Even if he was sick, he still went on the field.

Best coach you've played for?

Jose Mourinho. I've had 18 coaches and I know what I'm talking about.

His strength is that he works a lot with the players from a psychological point of view. When he came to Chelsea, we went to a training camp in the USA.

This is not to say that we trained very seriously. And then he told us: “Okay, you earn a lot of money, but the number of zeros on the payroll is not the most important thing. The only thing that matters is the number of trophies on your shelf." We didn't lose another game that season.

Which partner have you lost track of and would like to meet again?

Damien Duff. It was he who helped me when I arrived in London.

Since I didn’t have a car, and he had two, he immediately offered to take one of them. But the right-hand traffic and the fact that I didn’t know either the city or the driving habits of its inhabitants made me refuse (smiles).

It was during the Arsenal v Chelsea match at Highbury (12/12/2004, 2–2). A few moments before the break, Arsenal earned a set piece on the penalty line. Without waiting for the referee's whistle, Thierry Henry struck and scored. In the locker room, Jose Mourinho screamed: “Damn it!

I told you that when a penalty kick is awarded in our direction, one of the players must immediately stand in front of the ball in order to have time to put up a “wall”. He grabbed a tube - I think it was ointment or something like that - and threw it against the wall. The tube hit a meter away from me, so I was covered in stains. It impressed us because Mourinho rarely showed his anger like that.

Funniest incident?

John Terry became his hero after one of his training sessions. I walked out of the shower into the locker room and saw several football players pushing a cart with dirty towels. I thought this was strange. And at that moment, when I passed by them, Terry, who had hidden there to scare me, jumped out from under a pile of laundry. It's corny, but everyone found it very funny.

Most rewarding moment in your career?

The Russian team's victory over the French at the Stade de France. We were losing 1-2, but ended up winning 3-2. To beat the world champions in their stadium, it was incredible! This was my best match in the national team.

One of the few times in my career when I felt like my team was invincible.

Biggest disappointment? The last match of the same qualifying cycle, against Ukraine in Moscow. We opened the scoring a quarter of an hour before the final whistle.

In the 87th minute I made a tackle, and the referee awarded a penalty kick forty meters from our goal. Shevchenko struck. Filimonov could catch the ball or turn it with his fist for a corner. He jumped and fell with the ball into the goal. It was terrible. A real tragedy. In three minutes it was all over. The victory made us group winners and we qualified for the Euro. And this goal sent us to third place, after France and Ukraine. And we took off. For me it remains a big disappointment because we had a good team that played really well and could have achieved something at that Euro.

Clad in blue kitchen aprons, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin baked delicious Russian pancakes.

Then the presidents tasted pancakes with Russian caviar, sour cream and onions, after which they clinked glasses of vodka.

While the presidents were enjoying themselves, the gigantic Vostok military exercise began, which Russian officials say involves 300,000 soldiers, 36,000 combat vehicles, 1,000 aircraft and 80 ships.

China is participating in the exercise, sending 3,200 troops and 30 aircraft, making the maneuvers the largest Russian-Chinese military exercise in history.

Are we seeing signs of a new Russian-Chinese alliance?

“This is not a military alliance, but everything is moving towards that,” Russian sinologist expert Vasily Kashin told the Vedomosti newspaper.

Both Western and Russian observers say the exercises show how closely Russia has grown closer to China as a result of its conflict with the West.

The Chinese and Russians have conducted more than 20 joint exercises together in recent years, but never at this level.

The exercises come as large Russian forces are put on alert in the west.

“Russia wants to show off its power to the United States and give the impression of being a superpower,” Russia expert Sarah Pagung of the German Society for Foreign Policy (DGAP) told .

While the soldiers were training, Putin and Xi Jinping promised that trade between Russia and China would grow by more than 800 billion crowns this year ( 1 Norwegian krone = 8.31 rubles, - approx. translation.).

In addition, a number of new large contracts were concluded, in particular between the Chinese company Alibaba and oligarch Alisher Usmanov.

China wants to learn how to fight from the Russians

In Russia, the exercises attract a lot of attention; in China, they are covered more modestly.

“This is an opportunity for the Chinese army to learn from the Russians, in particular military tactics and strategy,” said Chinese military analyst Song Zhongping in an interview with .

Context

ABC News: Do China and Russia really trust each other?

ABC.au 09/14/2018

Shanghai Observer: Where did Putin get his culinary skills?

Shanghai Observer 09/13/2018

Global News: Putin, Xi, pancakes and caviar

Globalnews.ca 09/12/2018

The Hindu: Xi and Putin intend to boost the Russian Far East

The Hindu 09/12/2018

The Chinese have not fought since the war with Vietnam, so they really want to learn from the Russian experience acquired in Ukraine, Georgia, Syria and Chechnya.

Is there any reason to fear the gigantic Vostok exercises?

Some Western and Russian experts believe that the exercises are partly a show to scare the West:

1. Russia regularly conducts large-scale military exercises “West” and “East”; exercises in the east are always the largest. In the east, the Vienna Agreement, which sets limits on how large exercises can be and also obliges the Russians to invite Western observers, does not apply.

2. “Don’t be afraid of the Russian army,” Russia expert Mark Galeotti wrote in . He characterizes the exercises as a “military-psychological” operation and a “geopolitical game” by the Kremlin.

3. On Kremlin-run TV channels, generals vying with each other to boast about how the Vostok exercise shows that Putin has made Russia great again. The exercises are used to convince the Russians that it is worth spending about 1/3 of their budget on defense and security.

4. Figures such as 300 thousand troops and 36 thousand combat vehicles are “absurd” and “completely unthinkable,” Russian military expert Alexander Golts said in New Times.

The number of Russians who want to introduce a ban on Chinese entry (to Russia) has doubled in recent years: from 15 to 31%, according to the Levada Center.

“We are good friends, and the friendship is becoming closer,” Putin told the Chinese president after the pancake party.

By comparison, only 4% of Russians say they could imagine having a Chinese friend.

Dark clouds in the east have put Putin in a gloomy state of mind

While Western media watched the Vostok exercises, few paid attention to what happened in the hours before Putin and Xi Jinping's pancake show.

When Putin met with his ministers, he was in an unusually bad mood, according to Russian media.

In local elections in Russia, Putin's United Russia party showed very poor results in the east of the country. And this is explained not only by the unpopular pension reform.

Putin used the meeting in Vladivostok to grill ministers over why the Kremlin's measures were not working in the Far East.

Low living standards, lack of infrastructure, corruption and economic hopelessness mean Russians continue to flee the Far East.

“We have to do something,” said one sweating minister, who lamented that two new bridges to China were closed due to bureaucratic delays.

“Of course we have to do something. Otherwise we will become a laughing stock,” Putin said.

Is China more dangerous for Russia than the West?

Although trade with China has increased since 2014, it is still 2.5 times less than Russia's trade with the EU.

For the Chinese, trade turnover with the United States is six times greater than with Russia.

“There is a serious risk that the Russian Far East will be populated and developed by China,” the newspaper Gazeta.ru believes. The newspaper characterizes this as a “much more serious phenomenon” for Russia than the threat from the West.

InoSMI materials contain assessments exclusively of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the InoSMI editorial staff.

Just a year ago, Tesla looked like a fast-growing company destined to revolutionize the auto industry. Its battery-powered sedan, the Model S, was quite popular among luxury car buyers. The autopilot system seemed far ahead of the competition. The company's chief executive, Elon Musk, promised that the more affordable Model 3 would soon roll off the assembly line and begin its victorious march to the masses. Wall Street admired it. Tesla's market value grew by leaps and bounds and even surpassed that of General Motors and Ford, automobile companies with a century of experience. But problems also accumulated.

Not only has the Model 3 announcement been mired in glitches and delays—“production hell,” as Mr. Musk puts it—but Tesla's efforts to develop driverless Autopilot have been marred by accidents, and the company continues to lose money quarter after quarter. Last week the problems intensified. Reputable ratings agency Moody's Investors Service downgraded the company's credit rating over concerns it was burning through cash. These worries are quite serious: some analysts believe Tesla could run out of working capital before the end of the year.

“I said some time ago that Tesla is far from being a reliable investment option or considered a stable company,- said Investing.com senior analyst Clement Thibault. - Tesla has been living on borrowed time and money for a very long period."

Tesla shares fell 8 percent on Tuesday and another 8 percent on Wednesday, and although they recovered some ground Thursday, Tesla shares have lost nearly a quarter of their value in less than three weeks. Following growing concerns about Tesla's ability to repay its debt, its bonds also fell in price. Those bonds, which become effective in 2025, were selling for about 88 cents on the dollar Thursday. Tesla representatives declined to comment to The New York Times regarding the company's financial situation.

But the latest problems of Elon Musk’s brainchild go beyond its balance sheet. US federal officials recently reported an accident involving a Tesla Model X in California - it ended in detonation of the batteries and the death of the driver. The matter is complicated by the fact that, among other things, it contains . The latter was also used during an accident in Florida in 2016, which also killed the driver: safety officials then concluded that the accident was not caused by an automation problem, but at the same time revealed deficiencies in the autopilot.

Finally, on Thursday, it is recalling 123,000 Model S vehicles built before April 2016 to replace the bolts that hold the engine to the steering gear. Bolts in cold climates can corrode and break, leaving drivers with only manual controls. The company added that there have been no accidents or injuries related to the problem.

All these changes are a test not only for Tesla, but also for its chief executive, who has built a reputation as an inventor and visionary, building a car brand from scratch, building the world's largest battery plant and making strides in private space development with SpaceX.

For years, Tesla rode the enthusiasm of its customers and a number of investors, although it has made virtually no profit in the 15 years since its inception. Presentations with announcements of new models, as a rule, caused almost religious excitement, and hundreds and thousands of owners greeted each new announcement by Mr. Musk with a wide smile. In anticipation of the Model 3, nearly 400,000 potential customers have made deposits of $1,000 each.

In November, Elon Musk has an electric truck, an incredible two-seater Tesla Roadster and a Tesla pickup truck. He promised to begin production of the truck by the end of 2019, even though the company does not have a plant to mass-produce it and has still not been able to overcome all the problems with the Model 3 production process at the Fremont plant.

"Pretty much Tesla is just a presentation and not something real, but Elon Musk is a master at voicing attractive ideas, said Kelley Blue Book senior analyst Karl Brauer. - The problem is that reality is starting to set in, and it is car accidents.Tesla, quality problems and long delays in reaching the stated production volumes of Model 3. All together it makes one wonder: is the company capable of delivering on its promises?”.

Without a doubt, Tesla has made some strides that have even big-name automakers scrambling to catch up. It proved that there is a viable market for electric vehicles, and such cars can very well be very expensive. It pioneered methods of upgrading cars through software updates, similar to smartphones. And it was its Autopilot that started the race to develop advanced driver assistance systems that can steer cars under certain circumstances and actively prevent collisions. However, today Tesla's technology already seems to be surpassed by the systems of other companies, including GM and Waymo (an offshoot of Google).

Elon Musk has also faced legal problems. In particular, one can recall his 2016 decision on the part of Tesla. A group of investors filed a lawsuit alleging that Mr. Musk had a conflict of interest because he was chairman of the home solar panel company founded by his cousins. Last week, the judge moved forward with the case.

In January, Tesla and Mr. Musk switched to a new remuneration system that is entirely linked to the company’s market value and other performance indicators. If he copes with all the tasks, he could be rewarded with shares worth more than $50 billion.

But the company has repeatedly missed its deadlines, especially with the Model 3. Mr. Musk initially promised that the Model 3 would come out in 2017, and that the car would sell 500,000 units by 2018. He later lowered the forecast to 100,000 Model 3s in 2017. In August last year, he already said that the company hoped to establish production of 20,000 cars per month by December and added that no one should have even a shadow of doubt about Tesla's ability to increase Model 3 production volumes.

But in the fourth quarter of last year, Tesla produced only 2,425 Model 3s. In its latest plan, it said it hopes to increase Model 3 production to 2,500 per week. The company is expected to summarize its first quarter results in early April. The Model 3's success is critical. The company must pivot its Model 3 business to generate revenue to satisfy investors and continue to fund the development of future vehicles, including an electric truck.

Moody's Investors Service concluded that Tesla needs to raise more than $2 billion more from investors this year to be able to finance its operations, continue capital expenditures, and pay off debt and other financial obligations that are coming due. According to the agency, Tesla will have $200 million in bonds coming into force this year, and another $900 million in early 2019. “Liquidity will be very tight by the end of the year,- Moody's Senior Vice President Bruce Clark said in an interview. - They need to restore confidence in the capital markets.”

Whether we are talking about a sunflower turning to follow the sun, its source of energy, or a Venus flytrap luring insects and forcing them to stay for lunch, we still have to ask the question: “Is this memory?” Does the sunflower remember that the sun rises in the east? Does he remember how he turns after the sun? Does the Venus flytrap remember how it charged its chemical trap and caught its prey?

Are these actions tropisms? (This is certainly true.) Are tropisms based on memory? This is debatable, but we say yes. Instructions on how to turn after the sun or how to set a chemical trap and catch a tasty insect in it are built into the body of the sunflower and the flycatcher. They are encoded in the DNA of these plants. They are information, and information is memory.

So we can see that plants “remember”, that they “know” what to do. But few would argue that plants have consciousness or intelligence (although, of course, it is impossible to prove that they do not have it). And plants most likely cannot learn. To borrow a term from the world of computers, their memory is part of their hardware.

Your dictionary

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is a complex chemical substance that carries genetic information in a cell.

Hardware - in relation to computer technology - a program that is part of the hardware and cannot be changed. In biology, the term applies to bodily functions or behaviors that are encoded in the organism's DNA.

Software - Unlike hardware, these programs are actually stored as information and can be changed depending on the circumstances. In biology, the term refers to those functions and behaviors that can be changed.

Secrets of the lunar race Karash Yuri Yurievich

But did cooperation have a chance?

So, after familiarizing yourself with the events of the autumn of 1963, in particular with the speech of the US President at the UN and the reaction of the Soviet leadership to it, you may get the following impression: the United States ardently and selflessly offered to build the USSR a “space bridge” between the two countries, and the Soviet Union this did not agree. The Kremlin did not accept this idea for the reasons that it believed that through this “bridge” the insidious Yankees would penetrate into the USSR in order to “sniff out” its strategic secrets, or this “structure” would mask the “abyss” separating both countries in the form of an arms race and foreign military bases along Soviet borders.

But even if everything is not so, how sincere was NASA’s desire to form a “lunar alliance” with the USSR? Recall that such cooperation could lead to a reduction in the allocations allocated for the agency's activities, and the difficulties of interaction with the Russians, according to Gilruth, could cause “trepidation” among NASA employees.

To answer this question, let's look at the agency's attitude to Kennedy's proposal voiced at the UN. In the weeks following the White House speech and in the absence of a clear Soviet response, NASA felt at a crossroads. A few days after Kennedy's speech, agency chief Webb outlined "general guidelines for NASA personnel." He sent a copy of the document to the White House, where it was approved by McGeorge Bundy the same day. Webb conducted a real linguistic analysis of Kennedy’s speech, highlighting moments in it that, wittingly or unwittingly, correlated with the agency’s intentions not to rush to rush “into the arms” of the USSR. The head of NASA especially noted the following: the President only said that “we should consider” the possibility of a joint lunar expedition, and that the key word here is “consider”, and as for the word “joint”, this is the goal that we should focus on during “consideration” and assessments [of the possibility of a Soviet-American flight to the Moon].” Webb specifically emphasized in his note:

“While we provide the Russians with a chance to work together and appear to the world as a nation ready to take on any challenges associated with cooperation in this extremely important area where weapons systems have not yet proliferated, we must continue to move forward with our own program(emphasis mine. - Yu. K.)».

Arnold Frutkin, the person responsible for international relations at NASA, shared similar views with Webb. In his opinion, “to rush from the proposal to consider the issue to the conclusion that the President openly asked to install an American spacecraft on a Soviet carrier for a flight to the Moon, or vice versa, or to assume that American and Soviet astronauts should form a joint crew for the lunar expedition...” would be clearly unfounded conclusions. As Frutkin emphasized, Kennedy’s words were nothing more than a “touchstone” for assessing the possibility of implementing such a bilateral project.

As for the option in which the Soviet Union would give a positive response to the president's initiative, NASA preferred a cautious and unhurried course of action. The first step, according to Webb, could be the joint work of the Soviet Union and the United States to choose a landing site on the Moon, and in general, both countries, as the head of NASA believed, could together do “a lot of things that would come close to ensuring that representatives [The USSR and the USA] ended up on the same ship.”

Employees of the Presidential Administration also agreed with the point of view of NASA employees. Thus, one of the members of the “team” of science adviser Jerome Wiesner noted that “negotiations on a joint program will most likely be long and intense in discussing many technical, administrative and political problems... Thus, slowing down the implementation of our program only based on the assumption that that the Soviet Union would do the same and that the [Soviet-American mission to the Moon] plan would be successfully implemented would be contrary to our fundamental interests.” Rather, the United States should “develop a preliminary plan for the joint program that would not only effectively utilize the combined capabilities of the two countries... but would also benefit the Apollo program by strengthening our position in joint negotiations should NASA or the White House rush to introduce this plan to Congress."

As for the White House, at the end of October he again recalled his interest in “lunar” cooperation with the USSR. On the 25th of the same month, McGeorge Bundy asked all individuals and organizations that would somehow have to “forge” forms and ways of interaction with the Soviet Union in space to prepare specific proposals regarding negotiations with the USSR on this topic. On October 29, Wisner gave Kennedy a memorandum proposing a strategy for preparing for the negotiations. Wisner specifically emphasized that "it is not difficult for NASA to put together a comprehensive plan for a joint program... and present it fairly quickly to the President for further consideration."

But what about Kennedy himself? Did he really “go into the shadows” after his speech at the UN, observing from there the Kremlin’s reaction to the proposal for a “lunar alliance”, leaving his assistants to think about how to give this “alliance” clear outlines? There were some reasons for such an assumption. The President was indeed in no hurry to take further steps without waiting for a response from Khrushchev or any high-ranking representative of the Soviet government to his initiative. However, he by no means lost interest in the idea of ​​​​cooperating with the USSR on a flight to the Moon. On October 23, he sent Webb a copy of a note about a meeting between Dryden and Blagonravov in September 1963 in New York, published in the New York Times on September 18. The president accompanied the note with the following note: “I think it would be useful to collect clippings like this one demonstrating Russian interest in landing on the moon. This will provide additional support to our efforts.” Kennedy, however, did not specify what he meant by “efforts” - US actions aimed at establishing cooperation with the USSR in space, or attempts by the White House to negotiate with the Kremlin on cooperation between the two countries in the exploration of extraterrestrial space.

After Khrushchev rather skeptically outlined the Soviet “lunar” plans on October 25, the president was asked at a press conference held on October 31: “Do you think that Premier Khrushchev took the Soviet Union out of the “lunar race”, and do you think that Should the United States, in any case, continue [to work on its lunar program] as if the "moon race" were still going on? Kennedy responded:

“I did not see this in his statement... I did not receive any convincing confirmation that Mr. Khrushchev or the Soviet Union had finally withdrawn from the “space race”...

The fact is that the Soviets are making an extremely large effort in space, and all available evidence suggests that they will continue it and that they have the capacity to do so. I would treat Mr. Khrushchev's words with great caution. As I understand it, he said that the expedition to the Moon should be preceded by appropriate preparation. We agree with this.

From my point of view, the space program that we have now plays a key role in ensuring the security of the United States because, as I have said many times before, it is not about going to the moon. The point is to acquire the necessary competence to control the world around us...

I think we need to continue our program. I think this is the best answer to Mr. Khrushchev.”

At the same press conference, Kennedy admitted that his appeal to the Soviet Union with a proposal to join forces with America to fly to the Moon remained unanswered.

However, Khrushchev’s statement on November 1, the day after the president’s press conference, in which the leader of the USSR unexpectedly expressed his readiness to cooperate with America in carrying out a manned flight to the Moon, accelerated preparations in the United States for the start of cooperation with the Soviet Union in this direction. White House Administration Officer Arthur Schlesinger, as well as State Department Bureau of International Organization Affairs staff members Harlan Kivland and Richard Gardner, visited NASA on November 5.

The purpose of the visit was to brief the agency on planning "the stages that may have to be passed through in considering the possibility of cooperation." The meeting at NASA became further evidence of the agency’s at least skeptical attitude towards the idea of ​​a Soviet-American “lunar alliance.” At the end of the briefing, Schlesinger noted that NASA's plans were "more procedural than substantive," providing for the exchange of information on existing programs and plans. At the same time, the presidential aide had the general impression that “NASA continues to have a very negative approach to the idea” of cooperation in carrying out an expedition to the Moon. According to the agency, “actual and significant steps will depend on the trust established during procedural interactions.” Realizing that the only way to galvanize NASA is to remind it that it must follow White House policy, Schlesinger suggests that National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy once again "express the President's interest in progress" in forming a partnership with the Russians to go to the Moon.

However, it is unfair to say that the entire agency opposed cooperation with the USSR. There was at least one NASA employee interested in participating in negotiations with the Soviet Union about cooperation in the field of manned spaceflight. His name was John Glenn. Let me remind you that this is the first American astronaut to make an orbital flight in February 1962. Upon his return to Earth, Glenn established friendly relations with President Kennedy and his brother Robert - a step, as the astronaut's subsequent career showed, that was explained not only by his vanity. Glenn became seriously interested in politics and left NASA in 1964 to devote himself entirely to his newfound occupation. In 1975, he was elected senator from Ohio and remained in this capacity until 1999. However, already at the end of his political career, his “first love” took over, and in 1998 Glenn made the second space flight in his life. True, this time it was no longer in the cramped “tin can” of a Mercury-class ship, but in the spacious cabin of the Discovery shuttle. After this, he became the oldest person ever to fly in Earth's orbit - at the age of 77 years.

But let's go back to 1963, when Glenn was still only 41 years old and a NASA employee. On November 4, he sent a memorandum to McGeorge Bundy. In fact, it was a response to a request from the National Security Advisor on October 25, 1963, regarding “negotiations with the Russians [on the exchange of] information obtained during space flights.” Glenn offered to "work together with Dr. Dryden, and also accompany him to meetings where [Glenn's] presence would be desirable, in order to explore the possibility of mutual exchange of information, particularly in the field of manned flight." According to the astronaut, the popularity he gained after his orbital flight will attract the necessary attention to such meetings and negotiations with the Russians. If the Soviet Union, Glenn reasoned, sent a representative of its manned program, perhaps an astronaut, to negotiate with the Americans, “it would demonstrate that the President's proposal had indeed opened a new channel of communication in the Cold War.” Accordingly, “the refusal of the Russians... will only demonstrate to the whole world that they do not want to cooperate... The President seized the initiative from the Russians (in terms of offering partnership. - Yu. K.), and one way to keep her is to accept this offer."

The White House quickly picked up Schlesinger's idea - to remind NASA of the president's interest in quickly drawing up a plan for cooperation with the Soviet Union. On November 8, Schlesinger and National Security Council official Charles Johnson drafted a presidential directive in the same spirit. They then asked "reliable people at NASA and the State Department to review its contents." They reported that they accepted this document “with enthusiasm.” Realizing that there was nowhere else to go, NASA head Webb also “cordially” welcomed the draft directive.

The directive was signed by Kennedy and became official National Security Action Memorandum 271 on November 12. The official title of the document was “Cooperation with the USSR in matters of space exploration.” Let us remember that such an official document has already come out of the White House. We are talking about Memorandum No. 129, which was issued in February 1962. This document ordered the State Department, together with NASA, the White House Office of Science, and the National Aeronautics and Space Council, to prepare proposals and recommendations for negotiations with the Soviet Union on cooperation in the field of space . At that time, the State Department played the main role in carrying out this assignment, and NASA played only a supporting role.

Now the situation has changed. Agency chief Webb was given direct orders to “assume personal initiative and primary responsibility within the Government for the development of a program of significant cooperation with the Soviet Union in the field of outer space, including the development of specific technical proposals...

These proposals should be developed with a view to their possible discussion during negotiations with the Soviet Union, which could be a direct result of my September 20 call for greater cooperation between the United States and the USSR in outer space, including cooperation in the mission to the Moon."

Why did Kennedy this time make NASA the main player in preparing negotiations with the USSR on “substantial” cooperation in space? Apparently there were two reasons. The first was that the period of political preparation for this kind of discussion, as Kennedy believed, was over and the time had come for concrete action. And who knows better than the aerospace agency what practical steps need to be taken so that the Soviet-American partnership in space is finally filled with real content? The second reason is personal. Apparently, over time, the president became more confident that there would be no “sabotage” of his initiative by NASA, and Webb and his employees, no matter what ulterior thoughts they had about cooperation with the Russians in space, would strictly carry out the will of the White House.

The actual end of cooperation Events that occurred in the field of domestic policy of the USSR, as well as in the international arena, primarily the change of Khrushchev's leadership to Brezhnev's, as well as the increased aggressive expansion of the United States in Vietnam actually

From the book Factor Four. Costs are half, returns are double author Weizsäcker Ernst Ulrich von

In positions of cooperation, Energy accumulators have long been helping each other in their work. If there is no need to install gasoline and, say, diesel engines on a car at the same time, then, on the contrary, it is advisable to combine batteries of different types. I have already talked about how

From the book History of Garbage. author Silguy Catherine de

Let's Give Designers a Chance Fortunately, this problem has a solution, as do the problems of other distorted incentives in building construction. For example, professional designers could be rewarded for saving rather than spending: they could earn their

From the book Take Off 2011 05 author author unknown

LET'S GIVE A CHANCE TO THINGS THROWED AWAY To get rid of outdated things, they are sometimes given to charitable organizations or to those who are engaged in “repairing and repurposing” discarded items and manage to find new uses for them. Following

From the author's book

558 ARZ is open for business cooperation JSC “558 Aviation Repair Plant” is one of the most successful and stable enterprises in the Republic of Belarus. This is the only enterprise in the country and one of the few enterprises in the CIS countries that provides such a wide range of