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 have been created-manned spacecraft and orbital stations: the single-seat Vostok, capable of up to 10 days of flight; the single-seat Mercury (up to 24 hours of flight); the three-seat Vostok (up to three days of flight); the two-seat Gemini (up to 15 days of flight); the three-seat Soyuz (up to 20 days of independent flight and six months of flight as past of an orbital station); the two-seat lunar mission craft (up to 30 days of independent flight); the orbital Skylab stations; the Salyut-series stations; and the multimodule Mir station. 36. Next, unmanned space vehicles have been created for scientific research. The most outstanding results have been produced with the Explorer 1 (discovery of the Earth's radiation belts); the Luner Orbiter (mapping of the Moon's surface from a satellite orbit); Luna-16 (delivery of soil from the lunar surface to Earth); Luna-17 (the self-propelled vehicle controlled by an Earth-based operator); Venera-4 (first data on the parameters of the Venutian atmosphere); Mariner 9 (studies and mapping of the surface of Mars from a satellite orbit); Viking 1 (studies of the surface of Mars and a search for signs of life in the vicinity of the landing site); Voyager (studies of the distant planets of the solar system); Uhuru, Ariel, SAS-3, Vela, Copernicus, ANS-1, COS-8. HEAO, and IUE (basic astrophysical research in the X-ray and UV ranges). 37. And last of all, the unmanned space vehicles for applied operations in Earth satellite orbit. Among them one cannot fail to include the communications satellites (Intelsat, Comstar, Sincom, Ekran, etc.), satellites for studying the Earth's natural resources (Landsat, Seasat), navigation satellites (like Navsat), weather satellites, reconnaissance satellites, and satellites for relaying distress signals and for determining their coordinates. ## 38. The Experience We've Garnered 39. The experience we've garnered is quite varied. By and large, it relates to the rather well-known tasks associated with the development, manufacture, testing, and operation of rocket and space hardware. 40. For example, problems related to safety surrounding the launch of rocket systems. Those problems mainly involve the large quantities of oxidizer and propellant that are loaded into the rocket. Toxic components, as they are used in such a rocket, make things very complicated at the launch site. There is always the danger of a breach in the integrity of the fueling system or the rocket itself, which would be fraught with catastrophic consequences. When components such as nitric acid, nitrogen tetroxide, hydrazine, or dimethylhydrazine are used, the danger to the personnel who are
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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.