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 module crew will have to consist of four people (two per team, so they can back each other up). If we must keep things to a minimum, then we can restrict the crew to two people, who both work at the landing site and then both make trips on the Mars rover. But that doesn't seem very intelligent: to fly somewhere that's worlds away and then restrict ourselves to some minimum amount of activity. Besides, the danger inherent in such a scheme of things raises some doubts about it. Now a compromise is under study: to have not one, but two Mars mission modules-one with a large laboratory section for work at the landing site, the other with the Mars rover. Their landings would be spaced in time, which would make it possible to use the second mission module to render assistance to the first if need be. And the crew of each would consist of two people. 217. The mission module would leave the Martian surface without the lander. In addition to a liftoff rocket system, the departing module would include a flight deck; gear for control, communications, telemetry, temperature control, and an electric power supply (probably based on chemical current sources, since autonomous flight without the lander won't be last long); life-support equipment for the crew; and a docking device. 218. The problem of communications between the mission module and the orbiter may prove to be a difficult one: only twice a day will the communications be what can barely be called satisfactory. And matters can be described as even more difficult when it comes to the need for communications between the mission module and the Mars rover when the rover is beyond the horizon. The problem can be solved by leaving the orbiter in a Mars-stationary orbit. The orbiter would be suspended in place over the surface of Mars, and its position could be over the landing site. Then, of course, there would be uninterrupted communications between the orbiter and the mission module and between the orbiter and the Mars rover and, consequently, between the mission module and the rover (through the orbiter). Such a version coordinates pretty well with a profile that uses an orbiter with electric engines. 219. The flight deck for the mission module could be rather small for two people-3 or 4 sq meters. 220. For the orbiter and the associated problems involving injection into a trans-Mars trajectory and injection from a Mars satellite orbit into a trans-Earth trajectory, there is no definiteness like that associated with the mission module. On the stages of flight between Earth satellite orbit and insertion into a Mars satellite orbit, the orbiter would include the mission module. The profile for a Mars mission would then look like this:
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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.