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
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24. confirmation of the absence of life on the Moon and on Venus 25. data on the atmospheres and surfaces of Venus and Mars (composition, density and pressure variation with altitude, relief) 26. large-scale maps and photographs of the surfaces of the Moon, Mars, and distant planets of the solar system and their moons 27. detection in the celestial sphere and mapping of sources emitting in the ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma ranges of electromagnetic radiation 28. detection in the celestial sphere of sources of X-ray and gamma bursts 29. confirmation of the existence of neutron stars and ''black holes'' in the Universe 30. discovery of heretofore unknown processes occurring in the Universe (matter transfer between close binary star systems, accretion of matter on the surface of neutron stars, accretion of matter on 'black holes''). 31. In terms of the creation of technical systems for space hardware, we have, of course, achieved great success. But we shouldn't flatter ourselves too much: after all, the space hardware has been working, so to speak, for itself. 32. Here we could note the following important efforts. First, various systems for putting spacecraft into orbit have been created: 33. expendable rockets, among which we could name, for example, the Soviet rockets of the R7 family (capable of putting a payload of about 7 tons into orbit), the Proton family (approx. 20-ton payload), Zenit (approx. 13-ton payload), and Energiya (payload on the order of 100 tons); the American rockets of the Atlas family (with Atlas-Agena capable of putting payload of about 3.4 tons into orbit), the Titan family (the Titan 3C can put about 12 tons into orbit), and the Saturn 5 (capable of lifting 137 tons); and the French rockets of the Ariane family (the payload mass of the Ariane 5 is expected to be about 20 tons) 34. "'reusable'' transport systems: the American Shuttle system (with a payload mass of about 30 tons) and the Soviet Buran system (the payload mass is expected to be up to 30 tons). 35. Second, systems for manned flight and manned operations in space
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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.