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.
# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 ## Document 5 of 10 for flight directors and cosmonauts. Of course, in theory, we could preserve the system that has come about for analyzing situations that come up on manned spacecraft missions and the system for arriving at a decision in the ground-based flight control center. But in a decade or two, such systems will probably be declared to be not reliable enough and too expensive. 176. For telephone and television communications with lunar rovers that are beyond the base's radio horizon, we could use lunar relay satellites or base/Earth-relay/lunar-rover and lunar-rover/Earth-relay/base links. Communicating through an Earth-based relay would be awkward, because there would be a time lag of about five seconds. We will apparently have to use both versions, because a lunar relay satellite won't always be in the radio horizon of the base and the lunar rover. Naturally, the information-and-control center must have telephone and video-communications systems, with all the necessary working space and living space, as well as outside areas (fueling station, power plant, landing areas, etc.). In addition, provisions must be made to ensure that the space outside and the surrounding area can be surveyed with television cameras. 177. The problem of power supply to the base is complicated by the fact that the two-week day will be followed by the two-week night. Therefore, if the power-supply system is based on solar panels, then the problem of where to get energy at night must be solved right away. Even if a ''hibernation'' mode is used by the station, that will require storage batteries weighing many tons. Besides, going into hibernation for two weeks out of every four would be inefficient. 178. To be able to use as storage devices water-electrolyzer systems that work during the day to store electrical energy and electrochemical generators that work at night to output the energy would require the creation of giant installations with enormous gas tanks for hydrogen and oxygen. 179. A suitable solution would probably be to use a small nuclear electric power plant (more precisely, two or three power-generating units set apart from one another). The generating units would have to be brought to the Moon in finished form (but not switched on) as priority cargo for the construction of the base and would have to be one of the first things to be installed. 180. The temperature-regulation system will have to ensure acceptable conditions that are fairly comfortable for the base's crew in terms of the inside temperature and conditions that are acceptable for gear and equipment in pressurized and nonpressurized station
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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.