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 ## Document 5 of 10 the appropriate systems for a manned mission: Mars orbiter and Mars mission module, a Mars ''automobile,'' and the appropriate gear for living on Mars and doing research there. 119. 12. Unmanned systems for studying Venus, an orbital base near Venus, atmospheric balloon-probes, systems for performing radar mapping of the surface, and landable laboratories. 120. 13. Solar observatories with the perihelion inside the orbit of Mercury; they would be intended for studies performed on a regular basis of the star closest to us-our Sun. 121. 14. Unmanned vehicles for studies of the asteroids. 122. 15. Unmanned space vehicles for studies of the distant planets. 123. 16. Truly inexpensive, reusable transport craft for transport operations between Earth and orbit. 124. Neither the American Shuttle nor the Soviet Buran is capable of solving the problem of lowering the transportation costs in space. Right now, the cost of putting payloads into orbit with the Shuttle system is about $10,000 per kilogram payload-that is much more expensive than even with the old, expendable launch vehicles. Which means that the problem of creating truly inexpensive systems for putting space vehicles into orbit is still with us. In my opinion, such new systems should be able to lift space vehicles into orbit at a cost of somewhere in the hundreds of dollars per kilogram. That will be a difficult problem, but we can solve it with today's technology. 125. 17. Inexpensive reusable transport systems for transport operations between low orbit and geostationary orbit. 126. 18. Space robots. We should expect an expansion of operations in open space in Earth-satellite orbits. Such operations will involve the creation of orbiting factories and large radio telescopes, the maintenance of orbital vehicles, and possibly the construction of orbiting electric power plants. The difficulty of movement experienced by individuals clothed in the armor of a space suit and the dangers of working in open space will compel us to develop space robots. 127. Below, individual areas of operations are examined. 128. Orbital Injection Systems 129. The main thing we have to do is create truly inexpensive
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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.