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 active part in the creation of such systems. 99. 2. A system of platforms in geostationary orbit for global communications, television, environmental monitoring, natural resources studies, and weather observations. 100. A geostationary orbit is an orbit lying in the equatorial plane at a height of about 36,000 km above the surface of the Earth. Satellites in geostationary orbit do not move in relation to the Earth's surface. We shouldn't place too many communications satellites in that orbit, because they would begin to interfere with each other's work. That is why, in the future, we will probably have to create multifunctional platforms that expand their capabilities. 101. 3. Orbital stations, which should probably be created in various versions: 102. station/laboratories like Salyut and Mir 103. stations like the American space station Freedom, which is currently under development 104. orbital ''cloud-stations''. 105. I think the last type of station is most promising. The concept of a cloud-station consists in the individual parts of the station-its modules-not being connected to one another in a rigid fashion, but 'floating' near one another. 106. 4. Orbiting factories for the production of ultrapure materials and biological preparations and for other production processes that will be profitable or better done in orbit. 107. 5. Unmanned space vehicles that are part of an international satellite system for observing and monitoring land, sea, and ocean surfaces and air space and underwater activity, with a system for sending the information to subscribers. 108. The international monitoring system could have three subsystems: 12-16 satellites with optical/television gear for daytime observations; 12-16 satellites with radars for all-weather and round-the-clock observation of land and ocean surfaces, air space, and underwater activity (monitoring of submarine movements); three-six satellites with gear for monitoring in the infrared range. 109. Today's optical/television space systems are already making it possible to look at objects from orbit that are on the order of a meter across and to transmit the images of those objects to
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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.