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.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 Document 5 of 10 the orbital unit of the base. The retrorocket is switched on, and the spacecraft is inserted into an elliptical orbit of descent. 279. Then the following happens: 280. the elliptical orbit is corrected so that the reusable spacecraft enters the necessary altitude corridor for atmospheric braking 281. the spacecraft makes reentry, and its control system controls its motion in the atmosphere via the aerodynamic lift of the speed brake in such a way that after braking and reentry, the apogee of the result orbit is roughly equal to the altitude of the orbit of the servicing station 282. when the spacecraft approaches the apogee of the resultant orbit, the propulsion system is switched on, and the perigee of the orbit of the spacecraft is raised to the altitude of the orbit of the servicing station 283. the spacecraft makes a rendezvous and docking with the servicing station 284. the crew transfers to the transport spacecraft that travels between Earth and that orbit, and the reusable spacecraft is readied at the servicing station for the next trip. 285. If we assume that same cost of delivering fuel to the orbital station ($5,000/kg), then the transfer to the reusable spacecraft could cut the costs for a crew change on the geostationary base by roughly half. But we must still consider the expenses incurred by the flight of the manned transport craft that travels between Earth and orbit and the costs of operating the low-orbit servicing station, which will be placed among the costs of operating the reusable spacecraft. So the gain may turn out to be not so substantial. 286. Nevertheless, the future is probably still with reusable systems. We need to go with them. A substantial cut in transportation costs, however, can be achieved only through consistent use of the principle of reusability and only through the creation of a truly efficient reusable transport system that can deliver cargoes to low, near-Earth orbit at a cost of around $100/kg. 287. As already mentioned, around 20 tons of freight will have to be delivered to a base in geostationary orbit every year. Hauling up that much with expendable cargo craft would cost roughly $500 million (assuming operations are in the plane of the equator). For that reason, we need to analyze the advisability of developing a reusable
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 53 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.