“Dedicated to professionals and their grandchildren who will be able to become professionals”. This was the slogan of a roundtable discussion held at the Borys Paton State Polytechnic Museum as part of World Space Week on October 10, 2024.
The event was dedicated to the 65th anniversary of the establishment of the Kyiv Research Institute of Electromechanical Devices (RI EMD) and the presentation of the book “Space Steps of the Kyiv Research Institute of Electromechanical Devices. History of Ukrainian Space Recorders”.
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The EMD Research Institute was established in 1959 as the main organization for the development of equipment and devices for magnetic recording and reproduction of speech information for the needs of aviation, space, the Navy and other sectors of the national economy of the USSR, and later of independent Ukraine.
Throughout all the years of the Institute's activity, Kyiv Polytechnic Institute has been and remains the basic institution for training its specialists.
The Institute was part of the well-known Kyiv Research and Production Association Mayak, but for many years it remained, so to speak, “in the shadows” because it worked on the development of only special equipment, so all its work was classified. The main customers were departments and organizations related to “military space”: manned programs, space reconnaissance, special space communications, information protection, etc. All this equipment was installed on artificial Earth satellites and interplanetary stations.
The presented book contains descriptions of all the products of the Institute for the first time. Some of them are unique and were made in only a few copies. All products were not inferior, and some of them surpassed foreign counterparts in their parameters. The documents, which have been removed from the classification, include creative biographies of the EMD Research Institute employees, and information about related companies. This information allows us to study a whole layer of previously unknown history of the former USSR.
The author of the book is Alexander Petrovich Provozin, Deputy Chairman of the Board of JSC Research Institute of EMD. He also created the Museum of Magnetic Recording Technology, which was produced at the Institute for many years, and collected exhibits for it.
During the roundtable meeting, its participants had the opportunity to get acquainted with some of the exhibits of this museum, hear the voices of astronauts recorded on magnetic tape during flights, and negotiate with the Mission Control Center. A unique piece of the museum is the world's first tape recorder for recording and reproducing speech information, Zvezda, created in 1960 for the Vostok spacecraft piloted by Yuri Gagarin.
The Institute also created tape recorders for the first group flights, for the Soyuz-Apollo program, for the Mir space station, and a real technological marvel - a tape recorder for use during the moon landing. This device weighs only 400 grams and can be operated in the glove of a space suit - and this was long before the first Japanese portable players appeared!
Veterans of the Institute of Electromechanical Devices shared their memories of the creation of space recorders. They talked about the enthusiasm and excitement with which each subsequent device was developed, especially after meetings with direct users - astronauts who collaborated with the designers and engineers of the Institute - G.S. Titov, G.T. Beregov, V.F. Bykovsky, Y.V. Romanenko, G.M. Grechko, V.A. Dzhanibekov, V.V. Kovalenko, P.R. Popovych and others.
I remember the speeches addressed to the students of Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute as “...to the grandchildren who will be able to become professionals” by the President of the Aerospace Society of Ukraine E.I. Kuznetsov, the Chairman of the Academic Council of the University, Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine M.Y. Ilchenko, and the Vice-Rector for Scientific Work of Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute S.G. Stirenko.
And very important for us as citizens of Ukraine is a quote from cosmonaut Pavlo Popovych's interview with the Ukrainian magazine Aviatsiya i Vremia, which concludes the book about the history of Ukrainian space recorders: “The contribution of Ukraine and Ukrainians to the exploration of outer space is enormous! If you analyze it carefully, astronautics begins with Ukraine. Just take a look: Kibalchych, Kondratyuk, Korolev, Chelomei, Yangel, Glushko... And I am the first Ukrainian cosmonaut and I am proud of it!”