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.
“Harder”1 page
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991
Document 5 of 10
## 187. The Mars Mission
188. The very first question that comes up is, Why? Exactly why do we need to be undertaking such a grandiose enterprise right now? There are no convincing arguments for it. Just the opposite-one can easily see an element of children's logic: 'It's a place we can reach and visit-so we need to go there!'
## 189. Here are the facts:
190. Mercury would be harder to reach (the trip would take a great deal of energy), and it's too hot there, and there's no atmosphere, and there's nothing to do there, as it were-it's the same rocky desert as on the Moon.
191. Venus, to put it mildly, is too hot at the surface (450-500 $ ^{\circ} \mathrm{C} $ ), and the pressure would be absolutely unbearable (100 atm), so we couldn't land there.
192. Jupiter, Saturn, and the planets beyond are even worse and more complex-it would take much more energy to get that far, and the force of gravity is greater, and the atmosphere-don't even mention it.
193. But Mars-that's another matter. The gravity at the surface is 0.4 Earth gravity. The atmosphere, although quite rarefied, still exists. And the temperatures are not as severe as on the Moon.
194. In a word, Mars is more natural and more accessible.
195. But what is still not understood is this: Why do we need to send a mission there? 'How can you ask that?' answer the proponents. 'We're going to have to colonize Mars sooner or later.' But why do we need to colonize Mars? It's clearly not suitable for human life. We could see setting up a base on Mars (if and when we see that it's needed), but it's hard to imagine a need to colonize it.
196. And yet, there is one problem whose solution could justify sending a mission to Mars-the search for life on that planet. There is some basis for hope (however slight it may be) that life exists: there are the remnants of an atmosphere, and photos of the surface of Mars show traces of water erosion. Might there not be simple organisms there, life on the level of, say, bacteria or fungi? Those living organisms themselves would not, in fact, be of as much interest as would the mechanism of their reproduction. What kind of mechanism would that be? The same as on Earth (and on Earth, from the standpoint of the organization of that mechanism, we are all-plants Not linked to a story yet.
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.