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.
## Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 Document 5 of 10 partial oxygen pressure that is normal for Earth. 302. Because of the smaller dimensions in terms of the ''height'' and ''width'' of the habitable space, the mass of the structure of the settlement in this project is roughly an order of magnitude smaller, but then the amount of space per person is also an order of magnitude smaller. But even in this version, it's easy to see that the creation of space settlements cannot be a means of solving the problem of the overpopulation of the Earth. In theory, one could imagine such grandiose operations as being feasible if mankind were to somehow acquire enough robot-entities that were specially created for living and working in space, were absolutely efficient (and always had a strong desire to work), could themselves design and build whatever they wanted and wherever (like genies), and still would take orders from poeple and would obediently carry those orders out. 303. But even if such settlements were built, would people want to live there? Live your whole life in a can. So what if it's a very big can, 150 meters in diameter! That's something for the psychologists. We might be able to think up some ''tin'' idea, but for Pete's sake it sure wouldn't hold up forever. 304. Space settlements for tourists along the lines of a Las Vegas in space-now that's something one might imagine, and such settlements might just spring up. 305. So it's unlikely that space settlements would save us from ecological disaster or overpopulation of the Earth. Mankind must someday grow up, and stop reveling in its fertility. Not by strong-arm methods or restrictive legislation, but by understanding the current circumstance must mankind as a whole and each individual separately arrive at the clear solution: we must put a stop to the growth of the human population. A natural ethical norm must be affirmed in people's awareness-that no woman should have more than two children. If all people were to adhere to that norm, the population growth would cease, and we would have a real chance of averting ecological disaster on Earth. ## 306. Flight to the Stars 307. Almost since the days when space program was taking its very first steps, it has been clear that anything within the solar system is reachable by the space vehicles or spacecraft that could be developed with the level of technology available and that, consequently, even if humans couldn't land on all its planets, they could at least make it to them. But at the same time, it has also become clear that here at home, in the solar system, we probably
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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.