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.
Document 5 of 10 fire, or contamination of the atmosphere with harmful gases, the pressurized spaces would have to be sectioned off and each section would have to have emergency entrances and exits. Pressurized spaces would best be shaped in the form of a cylinder 3-4 m in diameter. 173. Then there is the question of protecting pressurized spaces from meteors and from the large temperature differential on the lunar surface as day turns to night. We could, of course, use measures that are typically used for orbital space vehicles-screens and screen-and-vacuum insulation. But on the Moon, it would probably be more natural and more effective to bury the station structures in the ground and cover the top of the station with the excavated soil. Before the top of the station is covered, naturally, everything would have to be finished-e.g., all the structural assemblies, all the mainlines, all the plumbing, all the cable systems. The giant structures that make up the stations quarters cannot be transported from Earth in finished form. It would make sense to take up pre-cut sheets for enclosures-plus ''semifinished products'' in the form of frame parts, hatches, and, among other things, ''pipe-jacket'' reducers-and then to use, mostly, robots for doing the welding right at the prepared construction site for the base. 174. It is clear that construction of the base would have to be preceded by a lunar reconnaissance mission that surveys the area chosen for the construction of the base and brings construction equipment (scrapers, crane excavators) and construction materials from Earth. There would have to be, obviously, a landing of several construction missions to prepare the construction site (ground work), roads, and landing areas for cargo resupply vessels and manned spacecraft and, finally, to do the construction itself. And that, in turn, means that a temporary station would have to be brought up for those who are building the base. 175. The information-and-control center must be the conduit for information from Earth, from lunar rovers with researchers aboard (who may be hundreds of kilometers from the base, i.e., far beyond its visible horizon), and from workers who may be outside pressurized compartments at any given time, plus telemetry from onboard base systems. All that means that in order for the on-duty operator to be able to identify the current situation, there must be completely automated, computer processing of all incoming information, with output of correlated evaluations of the situation as a whole and of the situation for each distinct system and for each individual outside the base. The results of the analysis must presented clearly on electronic boards and displays, and recommendations must be given to the operator. Thus, powerful software must be created to replace the hundreds of specialists who work in flight control centers, analyzing already processed information and preparing recommendations
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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.