Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency file is a 1991 JPRS translation, report JPRS-USP-91-005. It carries the annotation and text of a Soviet brochure on the space program, written by one of the first cosmonauts. The brochure reviews what manned and unmanned spaceflight have achieved and calls the American lunar program a costly dead end pursued for prestige. It then proposes future tasks, including environmental monitoring satellites, orbiting factories, an international monitoring system, Mars sample return, radio telescopes and space robots.
“Low Earth orbit”15 pages
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 Document 5 of 10 Page 1 Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Status: [STAT] Report Type: JPRS Report Report Date: Report Number: JPRS-USP-91-005 UDC Number: Headline: Annotation Source Line: 00000000 FULL TEXT OF ARTICLE: 1. What's been done so far and what may lie ahead- something of a summary of the development of the space program, and an attempt at predicting how it will develop-are what is contained in this brochure, written by one of the planet's first cosmonauts. 2. The brochure is intended for a broad circle of readers. 3. Thirty years have gone by since the first man flew into space, and 33 years since the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite. One naturally wants to ask oneself, Just what have we succeeded in doing? What new things have we learned? What have we gained that is of practical value? 4. What's Been Done So Far? 5. In terms of manned flight, we can list the following achievements: 6. We have found out that man can live and work in orbit for a year (and probably longer). 7. We have performed six lunar missions. 8. Man can work in open space (in a space suit), but his mobility and his capabilities there are extremely limited. 9. Man can do research in space, altering its programs and aims in the course of a mission. His capabilities, however, are largely determined by the equipment on board, and he cannot compete with automatic devices in terms of accuracy of execution of precision operations. 10. Manned spaceflight has not given us any fundamentally new information (other than data on man himself in weightlessness and data on the operation of the flight systems themselves in space), and we are powered by the hope for now that we will be able to do something of substance in the future. 11. We still haven't found an ''ecological niche'' in science,
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 53 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.