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 facilities during the day and the night. Thermal insulation and the radiator removal of excessive heat solve that problem during the day. But night will require heating. The heat source will probably have to be the heat given off by the nuclear power-generating units or the heat from isotope heaters. In addition, the system will have to collect moisture from the air of the inside spaces of the base. 181. The high cost of delivering supplies to the Moon is the reason that closed-loop life-support systems will be used as much as possible. It would be difficult for everything to be in a closed-loop system, but water and oxygen could certainly be in a completely closed-loop system if electrolysis of water collected from the air, urine, and carbon dioxide were used. Nearly 300 kg of dehydrated food and about 100 kg of expendable materials would have to be taken for each individual per year. Such a system would have to be included in the base's equipment. But, of course, we need to try to solve the closed-loop problem for food, too. That would take complex equipment, higher levels of energy use, and more space. The task of creating a closed-loop system for oxygen, water, and food must be included in the programs of operation of space hardware for the coming decades. A closed-loop system for oxygen and water only would require about 300-400 W of electrical energy per person (i.e., about 2.5 kW for that one system alone). Of course, there must also be emergency reserves of oxygen, water, and food. 182. Life-support gear would include gear that would be brought up to the Moon, namely the following: clothing, underwear, and footwear; replacement parts for things like autonomous life-support systems, EVA suits, lunar rovers, tractors, and crane hoists; medical diagnostic and treatment gear; and exercise machines. 183. The base, naturally, would have to have advanced transport vehicles: lunar rovers for research expeditions, trucks, scrapers, portable drilling installations, excavators, etc. 184. At this point, it seems that it would be wise for the base to also have an on-duty evacuation craft to be used in the event of an emergency at the station. 185. And finally, the main thing is that equipment for scientific research and exploration must be developed. 186. A serious estimate of the mass of the base structures that will have to be delivered from Earth and an estimate of the costs will be possible only after formulation of the project gets under way. Preliminary estimates put the figures at about 100 tons for the mass and around $100 billion (or 100 billion rubles) for the cost of the operations to create the 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.