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.
Document 5 of 10 138. Orbiting Solar Electric Power Plants 139. One possible direction in the development of space-based operations to meet the basic needs of mankind involves the creation of orbiting solar electric power plants for supplying energy to ground-based consumers. Solar energy can be converted into electrical energy in various ways. But the simplest and most natural for our purposes is to use semiconductor converters that transform sunlight energy into an electrical current, i.e., solar panels. We have already accumulated experience in their long-term operation in space. Silicon cells are usually used as the converters-thin, small (several centimeters square) wafers in which a potential difference arises as a result the photoeffect that is produced when sunlight strikes them. Only a very small amount of power is derived from one such cell. The energy conversion efficiency in such a converter is on the order of 10-12 percent. To make a practical power-supply source out of those cells, they are linked in a series-parallel circuit. As a result, from one square meter of solar panel, one can obtain a quantity of power on the order of 140-170 W. Of course, such panels produce a current only under solar illumination, and such a level of power is produced only if the Sun's rays are perpendicular to the surface of the panels. That is why on many space vehicles, special systems orient the solar panels to increase the derived power. When the vehicle passes in the shadow of the Earth, the instruments and equipment get their electrical power supply from storage batteries that had been recharged by the solar panels when the vehicle was outside the shadow. 140. Orbiting solar electric power plants would be useful for supplying Earth with electrical energy. The electrical energy produced by the solar panels could be transformed into radio waves and transmitted in the form of a narrow beam to a receiving antenna on the Earth's surface by the pencilbeam antenna of the orbiting electric power plant. The waves received on Earth could then be reconverted into electrical energy and sent to consumers. In order for orbiting electric power plants to have continuous and immediate communications with ground receiving stations, the orbiting plants are best placed in geostationary orbit. 141. The most important thing in the creation of orbiting solar electric power plants is to master building in space gigantic structures that must be lightweight and steerable in orbit. We could begin, for example, with the assembly of an openwork panel unit that is, say, 100 x 100 x 100 m. And then, by gradually linking such units to one another, we could increase the area of the structure to dozens of square kilometers. A panel 100 sq m in area could derive as much as 10 million kilowatts of power. Transmitting the energy back to Earth from such an orbiting electric power plant would require 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.