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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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 Document 5 of 10 229. On the other hand, a spacecraft with electric engines has fundamental drawbacks: little experience has been garnered in long-duration operation of such engines, the spacecraft must have a powerful energy-supply system on board, and the service life of an electric engine is in the thousands of hours. 230. A departure mass of around 250-300 tons for a complex would require that a 7-10 MW electric power plant weighing around 70-100 tons be carried aboard the spacecraft. 231. Nuclear electric power plants have usually been considered, and added to the all the complications is the problem of providing radiation protection for the spacecraft crew and equipment at an acceptable mass. The problem is complicated by the fact that it must be solved not only for the flight of the complex as a whole (when the crew compartments and the section for the nuclear reactor do not move in relation to each other and, consequently, protection can be confined to the shadow shielding), but also for legs during which the mission module is departing from the orbiter and approaching it. 232. A spacecraft with a nuclear electric power plant and electric engines could take the form of a number of components located one behind the other along the spacecraft's longitudinal axis: the nuclear power plant, which includes the reactor and the shadow shielding that screens the rest of the structure and the living quarters from power plant radiation; the electric engines, with the propellant-feed system; the propellant tank; the trusswork connecting the nuclear power plant and the spacecraft compartments; the nuclear power plant temperature-regulation system radiator for the removal of heat unused in the converters that convert the heat produced by the reactor into electrical energy (geometrically, this is the largest part of the spacecraft); the compartments of the orbiter; the reentry vehicle used in the return to Earth; and the mission module. 233. Such a configuration for a Mars mission offers the advantage of the complex being extended along the longitudinal axis and the center of mass located in the vicinity of the connecting trusswork, and it would be relatively simple to produce artificial gravity in the crew compartments by rotating the complex around the axis perpendicular to the longitudinal axis (if artificial gravity were judged advisable for the crew of the Mars mission, which could last two or three years). 234. The problems associated with the power plant could change substantially if solar panels were used instead of a nuclear power plant. Solar panels with a total area of around 10,000 sq meters would be needed for an output of 7-10 MW. Solar panels could compete with a nuclear power plant only if the mass of the trusswork and the
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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.