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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antenna nearly one square kilometer in area. The ground-based receiving antenna would have to have a diameter on the order of several kilometers. It would probably be best not only to assemble the components of the panel units in orbit, but also to manufacture them in orbit. That is, to put, say, rolls of metal ribbon into orbit, cut it up there, and make rods from it, which would be used then to assemble trussed panel structures. Of course, other technologies for manufacturing and assembling the panels could also be found. 142. Needless to say, today's solar panel sheets couldn't be installed on those gigantic structures—they would be too heavy and expensive, because a square meter of solar panel has a mass of several kilograms. In recent years, however, a modicum of success has been achieved in the creation of film-type solar panels, a square meter of which might have a mass of only several hundred grams. In light of the mass of the trusses and other components of the structure, the adjusted mass of a square meter of panel on the solar electric power plant must be roughly a kilogram per square meter of panel and, consequently, about 10 kg per kilowatt of installed power (the mass must be that so that the creation of the solar electric power plant would be profitable, and that is achievable). A kilowatt of power produced by the orbiting power plant would then cost about 2,000-3,000 rubles (assuming the transport problem is solved). That is one and a half-to-two times cheaper than power from nuclear electric power plants, two-to-two and a half times cheaper than power from hydroelectric power plants, and four-six times cheaper than power from fuel-fired electric power plants. Orbital electric power plants, however, do not use up natural resources, and after several years of operation, they can be more economical than fuel-fired or nuclear electric power plants. And the main thing is, such plants would be ecologically clean. 143. The most difficult problem surrounding orbiting solar electric power plants is the problem of putting the materials into orbit for the construction of the plant. The mass of a 10 million kW plants would be around 100,000 tons. Solving that problem would require the creation of a completely new type of reusable launch vehicle. On one hand, it would have to be a rather large vehicle capable of lifting a payload of, say, around 500 tons, so that the construction materials for one plant could be put into orbit within two or three years (with 70-100 launches a year) and the construction could be effected with the same speed. On the other hand, if the undertaking is to be economical, the cost of a launch with such a vehicle must be no more than 50 rubles per kilogram of payload. If you compare that figure with the figure for the cost of using the Shuttle system to put a payload into orbit (on the order of $10,000 per kilogram), the difficulty of the problem becomes clear. The launch cost must be
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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.