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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## Document 5 of 10 of greater complexity that are associated with the replacement or repair of instruments and equipment, a crew would be sent on the craft. Since the service craft has no reentry capsule, it would consist of gear for control and communications, a power-supply unit based on solar panels, temperature-regulation and life-support systems, a propulsion system with a sustainer engine and steering engines, and a docking assembly. In addition, it must have systems for fueling the vehicle it is servicing: fuel-component tanks, pressurization tanks, a compressor (for pumping the pressurization gas out of the tanks of the propulsion system being fueled into its pressurization tanks), and automatic pneumohydraulic equipment. Naturally, the vehicles that are ''clients'' of the base in geostationary orbit will have to have standardized fuel components and pneumohydraulic systems for their propulsion systems (if only for fueling and safety), as well as docking assemblies. 264. The manned transport spacecraft can consist of three components: the reentry vehicle, the equipment section with a retropropulsion system, and a booster-rocket stage. 265. The reentry vehicle would hold the crew, equipment needed for the return leg to Earth, and the control gear and organs needed by the crew during the flight. The reentry vehicle has a heat shield. 266. The equipment section hold the following: control and communications gear; electric power-supply and temperature-regulation systems; life-support system backups; and the retropropulsion system. The retropropulsion system is designed to issue a braking impulse that ensures transfer from geostationary orbit to an elliptial orbit for return to Earth (during reentry in the equatorial plane, the required change in velocity is about 1.5 km/s); to adjust the trajectory of motion; and to effect control of attitude and coordinate shifts during rendezvous and docking. Since the propulsion system must remain ready for operation a long time (the manned spacecraft is expected to remain "'on duty'" as part of the base for the entire time that the crew it delivered remains on the base), it quite naturally uses high-boiling-point, hypergolic components. 267. The booster-rocket stage must lift the spacecraft from a low, near-Earth orbit to an elliptical transfer orbit (when operating in the equatorial plane, the required increase in velocity is about 2.5 km/s), and then, at its apogee, it must insert the spacecraft into a geostationary orbit (in the equatorial plane, the required increase in velocity this time is about 1.5 km/s). Four kilometers a second represents immense power needs. For that reason, it seems sensible to use oxygen and hydrogen as components in the booster-rocket stage. For a version so efficient, in terms of power, we can estimate the departure mass of that craft in low, near-Earth orbit to be on 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.