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.
# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 ## Document 5 of 10 reduced by two orders of magnitude. The task, however, is not a hopeless one. In economic terms, the Shuttle system is an order of magnitude more expensive than even today's expendable launch vehicles. And reducing spending by an order of magnitude by switching to a new type of reusable launch vehicle is not impossible. Of course, at the same time we would have to also solve the problem of moving materials that had been placed in a low intermediate orbit to a geostationary orbit. 144. And on that segment of travel, the expense would have to be about the same, i.e., for that segment we would also have to create cheap reusable systems that would probably use solar panels and electric engines. 145. Orienting the gigantic trusswork panels toward the Sun is a problem that is entirely solvable. After all, in practical terms, we would have to rotate the panel at a constant rate equal to one revolution per year. 146. Building the power plant in orbit would require specialized production. It would require builders. They would need housing-orbital stations. Of course, all production would have to be as standardized and automated as possible. The construction would have to be done primarily by robots. Which is why there would be only a few people there. They could work in orbit for, say, no more than a year per ''tour,'' which would mean that artificial gravity would not be needed on the builders' stations. 147. There are, of course, many other problems associated with the creation of orbiting solar electric power stations: the conversion of enormous outputs of electrical energy to radio waves, the onboard directional antenna with a diameter of about a kilometer, the systems for receiving the powerful stream of radio waves and converting them back into electrical energy, etc. But all those problems are in the realm of reality. 148. Space-based electric power plants are attractive because they can make a substantial contribution to the solution of one of the most difficult problems facing mankind today-the creation of ecologically clean power engineering. This is not an attempt to convince the reader that orbiting solar electric power stations represent the only sensible means of solving that problem. It cannot be seriously compared with any other until competitive projects as such are developed. But it is one possible, hopeful solution. 149. Orbiting Factories 150. Automated factories in orbit are promising and feasible.
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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.