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 and animals-relatives)? If the mechanism were identical, the hypothesis of the ''seeding'' of life throughout the Universe would be probable (it wouldn't be absolute proof-it would be one experimental point). If the mechanisms turned out to be completely different, the theory of the self-generation of life would be essentially confirmed. 197. Of course, it would be natural to try to ''catch'' living organisms with unmanned vehicles that landed on Mars. Such vehicles have been landed, but nothing has come of it. And there have been too few points of collection of samples, and the procedures themselves of analysis of samples for ''life'' are not very conclusive. 198. The Mars mission could be a continuation of the work done with unmanned vehicles. Possible tasks for the mission could be the exploration and study of areas of the Martian surface where there is some sort of chance of finding signs of life, a search for living organisms or plants, the collection of soil samples (at various points on the surface and at various depths) and air samples, an initial, on-site study of such samples (so that the research program could be adjusted in the event of positive findings), the delivery of the soil and air samples to Earth, and the study of the surface of Mars, the planet's structure, and the planet's natural history. 199. The equipment for a Mars mission would be determined largely by the primary operations performed during the mission and by the mission profile itself. For a Mars mission, it would be natural to adopt the basic profile used for the American lunar mission: trans-Mars injection from Earth satellite orbit, flight to Mars, Mars orbit insertion, descent to the surface of Mars of the mission module with some crew members (the others in the crew would remain in the orbiter in a Mars satellite orbit), research on the planet surface, collection of soil and air samples, return of the mission module to satellite orbit, rendezvous and docking with the orbiter, transfer of the landing party to the orbiter, trans-Earth injection from Mars satellite orbit, return of the mission to Earth. 200. Two components immediately become distinct: the orbiter and the mission module. Their appearance depends substantially on the amount of fuel needed for performing the dynamic operations associated with changes in the velocity of motion of the two craft. The amount of fuel spent in a given dynamic operation is determined by the magnitude of the required increase in velocity, by engine quality, and by vehicle mass. That is why in the process of analysis, before the choice of design profile or type of engine, the energy expenditures are usually characterized in terms of the increase in velocity of a vehicle (with the integrator) for the various stages of the flight.
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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.