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 lunar base in the coming decades, let's try to imagine what it would look like and how much work would be done there. (We intend to publish a brochure on lunar base projects in the near future.-Ed.) 168. The tasks performed by the lunar base could include regular studies of the Moon (seismicity, meteoritic conditions, structure, geology, exploration for lunar minerals useful to man), empirical verification of the possibility and advisability of mining minerals, and construction of an astrophysical observatory if further studies demonstrated the advisability of creating one on the Moon, where the absence of an atmosphere, the low gravity factor, and the possibility of installing telescopes on immobile foundations would seem, at first glance, to offer important advantages over Earth-based and orbital telescopes. 169. The last task could turn out to be a rather important one, especially if we manage to demonstrate the possibility of building synthetic-aperture telescopes with reflectors spaced as far apart as possible. 170. The base would naturally have an information-and-control center, laboratories, separate cabin-apartments for the base workers, areas for physical exercise, a messroom, a wardroom, and a kitchen; an airlock/hangar for servicing and repairing lunar rovers; production facilities; a power plant; systems for life support and temperature maintenance; a greenhouse; warehouses for things like spare parts, fuel, and collected samples; lunar rovers for research expeditions, transport vehicles, and hangars for them; and hangar/shelters for on-duty emergency evacuation craft. 171. Since the flight of a transport craft and crew to the Moon could cost around $1 billion, such a mission would naturally be geared to a lengthy stay by the specialists at the base. In addition, we would need to take into consideration the isolation and the psychological stress associated with working at the base. For that reason, we will need to provide rather comfortable living and working conditions for the lunar base crew. The crew would best consist of five or six individuals, each with two or three specialties. 172. Each crew member would need to have a separate cabin, 50-100 cu meters, with all the conveniences. In addition, there would have to be backup living quarters for overtime work and for emergency situations. Roughly the same amount of space would have to be earmarked for the main and backup information-and-control centers, laboratories, gyms, messroom, wardroom, kitchen, and production facilities. The total amount of space for the pressurized areas, including living quarters, could be around 2,000 cu meters. In light of the the theoretically ever-present danger of depressurization,
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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.