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 the mirrors is equal to the length of the cylinder, and the width corresponds to the width of "'windows.'" Energy is supplied to the population from thermoelectric power plants that get their energy from the Sun via two parabolic mirrors on the ends of the cylinders opposite the Sun. The ends of the cylinders on the Sun side have docking positions for spacecraft. 294. Inside the cylinders is a normal terrestrial atmosphere. Main transportation arteries are laid out on the inner surface of the cylinders, and on that surface is also housing, factories, public buildings, stores, etc. All that is, as it were, beneath one hilly roof (the roof is toward the axis of the cylinder-''up'' for the inhabitants is toward the axis of the cylinder). The roof is covered with soil, and growing on it are trees and grass, on which agricultural operations are performed; strolling lanes have also been laid out, and there are ponds and lakes. In a word, a terrestrial landscape is reproduced above the living and industrial facilities. The settlement has a closed-loop life cycle that uses biological as well as chemical-mechanical methods. Construction materials, raw materials, nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen are brought in from Earth, the Moon, the asteroids, etc. The population density is on the order of 30,000 people per square kilometer, which is roughly three times higher than the population density in Moscow. Thus, each cylinder is a city like New York or Moscow, with a population of 10 million, but where virtually all the housing and all the industrial buildings have been moved so they are under the ground. 295. The mass of a settlement is around 10-15 billion tons, which immediately brings up the question, Where do you get such a huge amount of construction materials? Those to whom the idea belongs suggest getting the materials from the Moon. That suggestion is tied to some extent to the location of the settlement. They suggest that it be located at the fourth or fifth Lagrangian point in the Earth-Moon system, each of which is located on the Moon's orbit equidistant from the Earth and the Moon. Lagrange showed that a body located at one of those points will maintain a stable position in the Earth-Moon system. That feature of the Lagrangian points could, according to the thinking of O'Haley and his group, make delivery of materials from the Moon to the construction site somewhat easier. 296. Extraction, delivery, and processing of the materials is described by the group in the following manner. A highly automated mining and ore-dressing industry is set up on the Moon. Ore-bearing rock is processed to the needed condition and then poured into standard 'buckets,' which go to an electromagnetic catapult. Since there is no atmosphere on the Moon, all the acceleration takes place at the Moon's surface. A linear synchronous electric motor (which is the catapult) accelerates the buckets containing the rock to 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.