Friendship Under the Soviet Sky with Dr. Louis Friedman

Adventurers’ Club member Dr. Louis Friedman will be sharing his extensive travels and collaborations in the USSR and Russia in the 1980s and 1990s. Beginning in 1983, he worked with Russian space engineers, making over 50 trips focused on joint space ballooning projects. Dr. Friedman formed terrific friendships while also spending summers alongside his wife on Russian farms with their hosts. At the same time, his early visits drew attention of KGB agents, followed by FBI debriefings when he returned home. This evening will be night of storytelling and intrigue surrounding friendship, space, and life under the Soviet sky.


Dr. Louis Friedman co-founded The Planetary Society with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray in 1979, and served as its Executive Director for 31 years. He received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1961, an M.S. in Engineering Mechanics at Cornell University in 1963, and a Ph.D. from the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department at M.I.T. in 1971. From 1970 to 1980, he worked on deep space missions at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, and later helped pioneer solar sail technology. He led Cosmos 1, the attempt to fly the first solar sail, and was the Co-Inventor and Principal Investigator of the Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment (LIFE). He also led the design and development of the LightSail ™ spacecraft which carried out its mission in 2019. After retiring from The Planetary Society, Dr. Friedman was co-leader of the Keck Institute for Space Studies (KISS) Asteroid Retrieval Mission Study at Caltech and of Science and Technology to Explore the Interstellar Medium. In March 2015 he was reappointed (after and earlier stint in 2011) to the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) External Council. In 2019, he published his latest book, Planetary Adventures: From Moscow to Mars.

This program was organized by Louise Hamlin #1267.