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.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## Document 5 of 10 Weightlessness and the vacuum can be used to advantage in the production of the ultrapure preparations and materials that are needed in today's medicine and in industry. Of course, there cannot be absolute weightlessness on orbital vehicles-it exists only in the center of mass of the vehicle. But at points meters away from the center of mass, the accelerations are only a millionth of the acceleration due to gravity on Earth. And the vacuum is not at all absolute in orbits with an altitude of around 500 km. Nevertheless, both the accelerations due to microgravity and the pressure of the ambient atmosphere at such altitudes are rather low, which creates good conditions for certain types of production. The low accelerations due to microgravity make it possible to virtually eliminate from separation and crystallization the influence of the convection associated with the splitting of components in a mixture by the force of gravity and to dramatically reduce the number of defects formed in crystallization. Experimental operations that have been performed on orbital stations, manned spacecraft, and unmanned space vehicles in the context of research on the efficiency of various production processes in orbit show that the quality of the processes is improved in weightlessness. But we have yet to achieve a level that enables us to draw definite conclusions and begin designing orbiting factories. 151. Areas that hold promise today are those that involve production processes associated with the purification of biological preparations on electrophoresis units of any kind for the pharmaceutical industry, processes associated with the growth of crystals of materials used in the electronics industry, processes associated with raising the purity and relative mass of output of a product, and processes associated with the production of optical glass fiber for fiber optics, which in orbit can yield better products and can be more economical than can ground-based production. ## 152. Radio Telescopes 153. Radio telescopes in near-Earth orbits or, what is more effective, in Sun-satellite orbits may be one of the most effective means of studying the Universe. With receiving antennas that are hundreds of meters in diameter, radio telescopes can detect signals from objects that are at the edge of our Universe. If observations are made with several radio telescopes spaced across a distance on the order of the diameter of a solar orbit, the principles of interferometry can be used to produce, as mentioned earlier, an absolutely fantastic resolution in the ten-millionths of a second of arc. The size itself of receiving antennas that are hundreds of meters across need not be disturbing-the erection of structures of such dimensions in weightlessness is entirely feasible with today's technology. The main problem would be ensuring precision of surface
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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.