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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254. Based on a cost of $5,000/kg to put a payload into low orbit, using today's expendable orbital-injection systems would put the cost of sending a spacecraft weighing approximately seven tons (which includes the mass of the propulsion system and fuel needed for a return to Earth) to the base at around $250-350 million, depending on the launch vehicle used, the orbital plane of injection to the intermediate orbit, and the components used in the rocket stage for transferring the spacecraft from intermediate orbit to geostationary orbit. That's a lot. So we need to aim for as small a crew as possible on the station and for a rather long tour of duty. We can tentatively expect a base crew of three cosmonauts who serve a tour of duty of one year. 255. A base in geostationary orbit could be configured as a unitized structure, like the Mir station and the Freedom station project, or as a cloud-station, and it would consist of individual modules: an orbital unit with a platform (making up the main module) and a fueling station. In a cloud-station version, the fueling station would drift at a distance of 10-50 km away from the main module. 256. The orbital unit would have to have at least three docking ports-one for a manned spacecraft, a second for a cargo spacecraft, and the third for a backup spacecraft. All the inside facilities could easily be fitted in a space of 150-200 cu meters (a cylinder about 4 m across and 12-15 m long). 257. The inside gear for control and communications would include onboard computers; gyroscopic sensors and accelerometers; the radar receivers and responders used when spacecraft rendezvous with the orbital unit; gear for communications with Earth (direct and through relay satellites), with the transport vehicle, with cosmonauts doing EVAs, with the radio telescope, and with the fueling station; gear for processing telemetry; consoles; manual controls; instrument panels; displays; screens for displaying incoming information; and television gear. 258. In light of the cost of cargo deliveries, we would rely on a system that is completely closed-loop for water and oxygen and that uses for its functioning expendable materials in the form of equipment components that are replaceable in the process of operation. Dehydrated food, plus underwear and clothing, would be delivered by cargo spacecraft. The mass of those materials would be on the order of two-three tons a year in the context of an expected total freight traffic volume to the base of about 15-20 tons a year (remember that the freight traffic volume to the Mir station is 10-15 tons a year). Most of the cargo would consist of things like equipment for regular operations, instruments and assemblies needing
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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.