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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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 ## Document 5 of 10 of the antenna. After all, the precision must be to a fraction of the wavelength at which the measurements will be made. For example, for observations made at 20 cm, the precision of the surface would have to be such that it is measured in centimeters for a structure a kilometer across! And the thermal deformations of the structure would also have to be in the centimeters. The problem, it seems, would have to be solved by using adjusting elements and a laser measuring system. ## 154. The Cloud-Station 155. The idea of a cloud-station owes its existence to the difficulties associated with the creation and functioning of large structures such as the American orbital station Freedom, which is under development at this time. Such difficulties include the following: 156. the enormous size of the trusswork structures that hold the living quarters, fueling stations, production facilities, telescopes, solar panels, and transport craft, which results in enormous moments of inertia and in difficulties in orienting such structures 157. excessive programming of such stations, which limits the possibilities for developing and improving production and research programs 158. the inclusion of production facilities in the same structure as the other facilities leads to an increase in the levels of microgravity in the production facilities, which in all likelihood would have an effect on the quality of the product being made and would require restrictions on orientation and control of motion and on crew activity 159. the operation of first-class telescopes requires attitude control with an accuracy to within hundredths of a second of arc, which would probably be impossible for the entire structure, even if freedom of angular movement relative to the station structure were provided for the telescopes 160. the inclusion in the station structure of fuel containers that generally hold hypergolic components and a complex pneumohydraulic system for taking on fuel from refueling craft and for distributing it to the users in the station is not without danger and is to be considered undesirable. 161. On the other hand, it is natural to locate all those facilities near one another, in order to be able to adjust, repair, test, and maintain all the telescopes, production laboratories, plants, and
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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.