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 solar cells themselves did not exceed 7-10 kg per kilowatt of derived electrical energy. That could be achieved if film-type solar panels with a mass of 100-200 g/m22 and an efficiency of around 5-7 percent were created. Thus, film-type solar panels could become necessary for the Mars mission, for orbiting solar electric power plants, and for orbiting factories. Developing such panels is an urgent task for modern technology. 235. For a Mars mission that uses chemical-propellant jet engines only, choosing a mission profile that is optimal in terms of power needs is essential. 236. Such a profile would consist of the following: 237. injection of mission spacecraft into a low, near-Earth, assembly orbit, and use of transport craft to deliver the crew to the complex of mission spacecraft 238. injection of hydrogen-oxygen booster rocket (designed for the sole purpose of injecting the mission spacecraft into a trans-Mars trajectory) into the assembly orbit, and docking with the mission spacecraft 239. departure for Mars (with undocking of the booster rocket after its work is finished) at the most optimal date such that the escape velocity from near-Earth orbit is 3.7-4.0 km/s 240. insertion into a severely elongated elliptical Mars satellite orbit with virtually no fuel expense, as a result of braking of the spacecraft in the Martian atmosphere (during the motion in the atmosphere, the spacecraft must be protected from heat by a heat-protection shield) 241. separation of the mission module, its descent, operations on the surface, return of the module to orbit, rendezvous and docking with the orbiter, transfer of the mission module crew to the orbiter, separation of the mission module 242. injection of the orbiter from Mars satellite orbit into a trans-Earth trajectory with the sustainer engine of the orbiter's consolidated propulsion system 243. upon approach to Earth, transfer of crew to reentry vehicle, reentry at escape velocity, and touchdown. 244. The following figures can give us something of an idea of the overall size of the complex: with the total mass of the orbiter and the mission module and their propulsion systems and fuel at around
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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.