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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Document 5 of 10 fueling stations. 162. Those difficulties and contradictions can be eliminated by using a cloud-station system. Imagine a station consisting of several autonomous units-for example, the living quarters base unit, an astrophysical observatory, a production/laboratory module, and a fueling module. All the units are flying in the same orbit, not too far from one another, such that the distance from the base unit to any of the other units is always within a certain range (say, 10-100 km). To accomplish that, each unit needs to have a system for measuring distance and radial velocity relative to the base unit and a propulsion system with motors for making coordinate shifts. 163. The pattern of action is rather simple here. The rate at which a unit moves away or approaches is reduced to a minimum that is determined by the sensitivity of relative velocity meters. Assume that it is 1.5 cm/s. Then the distance increases to 50 km from 10 (depending on the features of the motion of the satellite in orbit) over a period of roughly nine-10 days. When the distance nears 50 km, the outer unit fires an impulse that changes the sign of the relative velocity, and the unit begins to approach the station and pulls up to within that original 10 km within another nine days, etc. If the relative velocity is measured with an accuracy on the order of a centimeter per second (which is quite realistic for today's radars), then the amount of fuel required for keeping the units of the station in a given relative position is considerably less than the amount we must use in any case to compensate for the atmospheric drag on the station. Thus, the telescope, for example, can be kept 10-50 km behind the base unit, with the production module 10-50 km ahead and the fueling module still farther ahead, say, 60-100 km from the base unit. 164. The makeup of such a cloud-station could expand and change. It would be natural to use the base unit of the station, where the duty shift of cosmonauts are located, also as a geophysical module, with gear for environmental monitoring, for studying natural resources, etc. Hardware for medical and biological research could also be located there. 165. The base unit would also have several docking positions for manned spacecraft and cargo resupply craft and for orbital "'cars''-vehicles designed to fly the cosmonauts between station units for maintenance purposes. 166. The Lunar Base 167. Without concerning ourselves with the question of the timeliness or level of priority associated with the creation of a
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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.