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 cargo spacecraft. 288. Such a craft would take the form of a reusable tow craft with electric engines that receive the electrical energy for their operation from solar panels. With a tow craft mass of about 30 tons, and about 10-12 tons of that being fuel, the tow craft could deliver 10 tons of cargo to a base in geostationary orbit, i.e., it would use about a kilogram of its fuel for each kilogram of payload. Thus, the delivery of 20 tons of cargo to a base in geostationary orbit would cost $200-250 million (even if the cost of putting the cargo into low, near-Earth orbit were assumed to be $5,000/kg). Such a tow craft, of course, would have a big drawback: the slowness of the delivery of cargo, since its flight from low orbit to geostationary orbit would take several months. 289. For that very reason, and because the craft would be long in the radiation belts, spacecraft with electric engines will hardly be used to delivery crews to bases in geostationary orbit (a crew would have to sit in the small space of a radiation shelter for two months during the flight). ## 290. Space Settlements 291. The Earth is overpopulated. The ecological problems that have risen up before mankind at the end of our century are the result of not only the irresponsible waste of natural resources and imprudent industrial and agricultural practices, but also the fact that there are already too many people on Earth. Maybe that's why the old idea of resettling people in space is again beginning to attract attention. Since the 1970s, suggestions have been appearing on the creation of space settlements. 292. One of the most brilliant projects belongs to J. O'Haley. He and a group of enthusiasts have developed and proposed several types of space settlements that differ in size and whose populations range from 10,000 to 20 million. In the latter case, the settlement consists of two parallel cylinders joined by a frame; each cylinder is 6.4 km across and 12 km long. The cylinders are rotated about their axes at a rate of 0.53 rpm, which produces a centrifugal acceleration on the inner surface, which is inhabited by the people of the settlement, and that acceleration is equal to the normal acceleration of the force of gravity on the Earth's surface. 293. The cylinders rotate in opposite directions to compensate for their angular momentum, so it won't interfere with the orientation of the settlement. The axes of the cylinders point to the Sun. Part of the wall (roughly half) is transparent, and offset, cylindrical mirrors direct the light from the Sun into the cylinders. The length
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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.