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 won't find anything unusual. It's unlikely that, with the data we produce on our trips about our solar system, we will be able to move very far forward in our understanding of the physical picture of the world in which we live. 308. That means we need to look to the stars, and starships. What kinds of problems need to be solved before star missions can become a reality? 309. The first problem is time. Even if we could build a starship that could fly at a speed close to the speed of light (say, at a speed on the order of 70 percent the speed of light), travel in our galaxy would take thousands or even tens of thousands of years, because the diameter of the galaxy is nearly 100,000 light years. 310. At the end of a journey, what would be left even of cosmonauts who had been 'frozen''? What would be left of embryos? And do we have a right to decide the fate of people who haven't even been born yet? And even if we could solve that problem, the travelers would come back to a world totally foreign to them. A flight to the stars wouldn't be merely a trip, it would be a flight to another life. For those around you, your relatives and friends, it would be something akin to your suicide. 311. The second problem involves dangerous streams of gas and dust. Interstellar space is not empty. Remnants of gas and dust, streams of particles, are everywhere. For a starship traveling at a speed close to the speed of light, those gas and dust remnants create a high-energy stream that would act upon the ship and against which there would be virtually no protection. 312. That stream would result in the vaporization of any protective shield and in unacceptably high radiation dose levels. 313. The third problem involves power needs. If a ship's rocket engine were to use the most efficient thermonuclear reaction and the ship were to have the ideal design, a roundtrip at a speed of near the speed of light would require that the ratio of initial mass to final mass be no worse than 10sup>30, which is unrealistic. 314. And as for the creation of a photon engine for the starship, which would be based on the use of annihilation of matter, certain problems are evident, but their solutions are not. Nevertheless, let's try to imagine a galactic, photon-powered ship capable of flying at a speed rather near the speed of light, which would remove the problem of time. The time itself that it would take for cosmonauts to fly roundtrip on a journey covering a distance equal to about half the diameter of our galaxy- assuming an optimal timetable
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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.