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
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## Document 5 of 10 proper velocity, and then the deceleration mode is switched on. The buckets are open in the direction of motion, and for that reason, when the motor is switched to a deceleration mode, the prepared rock flies out in the direction of the acceleration. The direction and speed are chosen such that the rock ''flies'' to the second Lagrangian point (which is located on a line between the Earth and the Moon, opposite the Earth). There the rock is collected by ''interceptors,'' and on freighter spacecraft that are powered by electric engines it is taken to the construction site. Back on the Moon, the motor slows the buckets to virtually zero velocity, and they are dispatched for the next load, and the next cycle of acceleration begins. 297. Based on a 15-year construction period, nearly 1 billion tons of processed rock a year (30 tons a second in continuous 'tossing'') must be sent from the Moon. And if we want to stabilize the Earth's population with a continuous emigration of the excess population to space, then an excess of 50 million people a year would require that nearly 40 billion tons of rock a year (that's 1,300 tons a second!) be dispatched from the Moon. But that is considerably more than everything that is being mined right now on Earth. 298. Warehouses for raw materials, semifinished products, and finished products would have to be built at the construction site, in the vacuum, as would plants for things like ore dressing and metallurgy. The productivity of that industrial country in space (the whole operation is get 'housing' up in time for the growing humanity) would have to be on the order of 30-40 billion tons of product a year: that is roughly equivalent to what the industry of the entire Earth is capable of processing and producing. 299. Another project under the name of the ''Stanford Torus'' (it was developed at Stanford University, in the United States) proposes building space settlements in the shape of tori 1.6 km across, with a cross-section diameter of about 150 m. In practical terms, such a settlement, designed for 10,000 people, is a densely developed city in the form of one closed street with a solid wall of homes and buildings on each side. 300. The torus rotates around its axis of symmetry to produce gravity for its inhabitants. A mirror hovering over the torus (with a diameter roughly equal to the diameter of the torus) reflects the Sun's rays onto a circular mirror that is rotating along with the torus, and that mirror directs the light through round 'windows' into the torus. 301. Along the axis of the torus are equipment, docking positions, and industry. The air pressure in the torus is 0.5 atm, with a
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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.