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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## UNCLASSIFIED # Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 Document 5 of 10 reusable systems for placing space vehicles into orbit. 130. At the moment, the cost of putting space vehicles into orbit is extremely high. That stems from the high cost of rocket engines, the complex control system, the expensive materials used in rocket and engine structures, and, primarily, their one-time use. It was natural that as early as in the 1970s, someone got the idea to create a reusable injection system. 131. The first bit of experience that was acquired in implementing that idea was the creation of the Shuttle system. In spite of the marvelous work that was done, that experience can hardly be called successful. In the original project, the cost of a launch of the system was not to exceed a sum on the order of $10 million. But that was too optimistic an estimate, and in years past the cost of launching the system has fluctuated between $150 million and $350 million. The main reasons for that are these: the use of a considerable number of expendable elements in the structure; a very complex design and, accordingly, complex preparations for launch in which a great many specialists must take part. It must be said, of course, that the analogous Soviet Buran system is no better than the Shuttle system in that regard. 132. That is why the creation of a truly reusable, truly inexpensive system for placing space vehicles into orbit remains an urgent task. In that connection, a solution to the problem may be sought in two directions. 133. The first is rather trivial: create a reusable, single-stage, oxygen/hydrogen rocket with a highly advanced design. That rocket would go into orbit, deposit the space vehicle there, and then descend from orbit, decelerate in the dense layers of the atmosphere, and make a landing in the vicinity of the launch. That would be possible if we managed to develop a design in which the mass of the tanks, the engines, the heat shield, the return rocket's landing system, the control system, and the space vehicle itself that is being placed into orbit did not exceed 10-11 percent of the launch mass. That would require ultrastrong, ultralight materials, plus very light engines, heat shield, and landing system. The task is a very difficult one, and there are a number of design ideas for resolving it, but they require additional research and analysis. 134. The other means of solving the problem is revolutionary. It is based on the principal shortcoming of today's rockets: their tanks contain not only propellant, but also oxidizer (which must also be lifted), even though a segment of the flight is through the dense layers of the atmosphere, where oxygen is quite abundant and would seem quite logical to use. But that's not incidental-use of
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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.