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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This area includes studies of, for example, the Sun, asteroids, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and their satellites and studies of the feasibility and advisability of space settlements. Such operations can hardly be considered to be of prime importance, but they shouldn't be neglected. The studies can be done with unmanned space vehicles. And only if the delivery of soil and air samples from Mars were completely unsuccessful or if we got information indicating that living organisms could be found on Mars would it be worth it to seriously consider organizing a manned mission to that planet. 91. It is implicit here that soil and air samples would be brought back to Earth for studies that would determine whether they contain living organisms, and if so, the studies would identify their genetic code or their mechanism of reproduction and thereby obtain information that would support a given hypothesis about the origins of life on Earth-whether it was 'self-generated,' or 'seeded.' 92. 3. Studies of the Universe. These studies represent extremely interesting areas of study, areas that, one could say, stir the imagination. They are capable of providing us with very valuable, unusual information. 93. Such operations include studies performed with space telescopes placed in circumsolar and near-Earth orbits and working in conjunction with interferometry; studies of the world around us, done with state-of-the-art orbital astrophysical instruments (on the scale of the Hubble space telescope) in various spectral ranges; very long baseline studies with optical telescopes that could be placed on the Moon, for example; and studies of flight to the stars. 94. The Space Hardware of the Near Future 95. Effecting such a program of operations will require that existing space hardware be improved, that completely new hardware be created, and that theoretical and experimental research be done. 96. One would imagine that the following hardware will be required. 97. 1. Low-orbit systems of standardized satellites for environmental monitoring, natural resource studies, and weather observations, with ground-based computer centers for processing information and a computerized system for delivering the results to subscribers. 98. There is a great deal of completed research in this area already on hand, especially in the United States. Those operations should be extended to a commercial basis. Our country could also take an
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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.