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
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## Document 5 of 10 atmospheric oxygen on the rocket would require air-breathing jet engines, in addition to liquid-propellant engines (a large segment of the flight still proceeds outside the dense layers). And they're much heavier than liquid-propellant engines. But new possibilities are now appearing in that connection. Today, the creation of combined engines that operate in air-breathing jet mode in the initial part of the flight, at speeds of up to 1500-1700 m/s, and then switch to liquid-propellant mode, is becoming a reality. That could provide a considerable advantage in launch-vehicle mass and size. 135. Those ideas apparently formed the basis of the English project Hotol. That airplane is supposed to take off from an airport, aided by a special launch chassis that remains on the ground. It then accelerates to an altitude of around 25 km with an engine that takes in oxygen from the atmosphere. At that point, it is traveling at a speed of about 1600 m/s. After that, the flight is performed with onboard reserves of oxygen. Liquid hydrogen is proposed as the propellant for both segments of the flight. According to the design, Hotol, with a launch mass of around 200 tons, is supposed to place a payload of around 7 tons into orbit and then return to Earth. Judging from the articles in the press, the work on the project has been halted-there's no financing. It is difficult to judge the feasibility of the project, because that feasibility hinges almost entirely on the feasibility of proposals involving the creation of a lightweight combined engine capable of operating in an air-breathing jet mode and a liquid-propellant mode, but almost no materials have been published on its working principle. The engine was developed by the well-known English firm, Rolls-Royce. 136. Work is being done in other promising directions. The German Sanger project also calls for the creation of a completely reusable two-stage system. The first stage is supposed to use air-breathing jet engines, and the second stage, liquid-propellant engines. After expending its fuel, the first stage is supposed to return to the airport. The second stage, after placing the payload into orbit, returns to Earth and is readied, along with the first stage, for the next flight. But the data cited in the press on the estimates of the mass characteristics of the components of the system have raised some doubts as to the soundness of the characteristics. 137. An even more revolutionary direction is being pursued at present in the United States. It is based on the idea of the creation of a ramjet engine capable of operating at speeds of up to around 7.5 km/s, i.e., virtually the entire process of acceleration of the rocket-airplane is done in the atmosphere, and almost no oxidizer is carried in the rocket. The basic research, as far as one can tell, is aimed at studying the possibility of creating such an engine.
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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.