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.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 72. So opinions are quite diverse. 73. It's probably wrong to pit pragmatic endeavors against people's natural wish to expand the sphere of their activity and to learn more about the Universe and our place in it. 74. In choosing the path we will take from here, it would be more sensible to strive both to satisfy mankind's most intrinsic needs and to study the world around us. 75. Among the most urgent problems facing mankind today are the ecology and the depletion of natural resources, political instability in the world, the separation of nations and the lack of trust between them, and the growing overpopulation of the Earth. 76. In terms of studying the Universe, the following tasks, in my opinion, could be considered the most interesting: solar system studies; studies of stars, galaxies, and celestial objects at the edge of the Universe with astrophysical instruments; and studies of the possibilities of flights to the stars. 77. In the context of such an approach, the following basic directions for space operations could be proposed: 78. 1. Activity that satisfies the intrinsic needs of mankind. Such activity would involve work of an applied nature that could provide specific benefits to people and would be, if possible, economically profitable. 79. Such activity can be divided into three groups of operations. 80. Group A consists of already established, almost traditional operations such as environmental monitoring of land, sea, and ocean surfaces; studies of natural resources with space vehicles; and satellite services involving weather forecasting, navigation, detection of distress signals, and communications and television. 81. Group B consists of operations that set up economically beneficial in-orbit production and that put into orbit production that is necessary, but dangerous when performed on the ground. Setting up such operations will require the expansion of ground-based and, primarily, space-based experiments that seek reliable, efficient in-orbit technologies and that conduct research that seeks a niche in ground-based economics that could naturally use orbital production. 82. This group could include operations involving research on the feasibility and advisability of the creation of orbiting solar
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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.