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 electric power plants that supply Earth with cheap, ecologically clean electrical energy. 83. It could also include operations on orbital stations involving research on the most effective activity of people working in orbit. 84. Group C consists of operations that maintain peace on Earth, that maintain stability and reinforce trust between states, and that prevent aggression. 85. That involves the creation of an international satellite system, open for everyone, for observing and monitoring land and ocean surfaces and monitoring air space and underwater activity. 86. Right now, it's almost just the Soviet Union and the United States who have satellite reconnaissance systems, which, by the way, still do not have all-weather capabilities and do not provide pictures of high enough quality at twilight or at night. Thus, it is being proposed that systems of satellites be created that would make it possible for everyone to see what is happening on Earth during both the day and the night, to monitor movements of troops and equipment and the construction of suspicious (possibly military) facilities, and to monitor the observance of international agreements. 87. Today's space hardware, in theory, can handle that task, and what's important is that the expense of creating and operating such a system could be borne by the world community. 88. There is, of course, something dishonorable about spying on each other. But what can we do in these times? The twentieth century has shown us more than once how criminals and maniacs have sometimes seized power. And that after strengthening their positions within a state by terrorizing and roughing up their own countrymen, they have made brazen attempts to seize neighboring states. 89. An international monitoring system would make it possible for all interested parties to monitor suspicious movements, construction, and preparations (after all, no enterprise begins operation spontaneously-it undergoes preparations, which can be noted) and to cool the ardor of gangsters who have elbowed their way to power. It would also enable the world community to take timely measures for repelling aggression or even halting preparations for it. 90. 2. Study and exploration of the solar system. Although such studies would hardly provide us with any fundamentally new information, it would simply be unintelligent not to study what is right under our nose. The scale of such operations is another matter.
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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.