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 order of 50 tons. If we assume the cost of manufacturing the craft to be around $50 million and the cost of placing a payload into orbit to be $5,000/kg (half as expensive as putting a payload in orbit from the Shuttle), then for an expendable spacecraft we get a figure of around $300 million in expense for each crew change on a base in geostationary orbit. 268. Could we cut the costs of a crew change by developing and using a reusable manned transport spacecraft for the flights from the low intermediate orbit to the geostationary orbit and back? 269. Such a spacecraft could be seen as consisting of the crew flight deck, the equipment section with the retropropulsion system (which operates on high-boiling-point components), a booster-rocket stage that burns oxygen and hydrogen, and an aerodynamic shield that plays the simultaneous role of speed brake and heat shield. 270. Such a reusable spacecraft, without any recovery capsule, could operate in the following profile: 271. the retropropulsion system of a reusable spacecraft that is docked with a low-orbit servicing station is fueled with high-boiling-point propellant components 272. the next shift of cosmonauts lifts off from Earth in a transport spacecraft that travels between Earth and the low-orbit servicing station and that performs a rendezvous and docking with the station 273. the reusable spacecraft is fueled with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, and the cosmonauts transfer to the reusable spacecraft 274. the reusable spacecraft separates from the servicing station, the engine of its booster stage is switched on, and it transfers to an elliptical orbit of flight for the geostationary orbit 275. at the apogee of the elliptical orbit, the engine of the booster stage cuts-in again, and the spacecraft transfers to geostationary orbit near the base 276. the spacecraft performs a rendezvous and docking with the orbital unit of the base by using its retropropulsion system 277. the crew transfers to the orbital unit of the base and begins its work. 278. When the crew finishes its tour of duty six months or a year later, it transfers to the reusable spacecraft, which separates from
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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.