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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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 ## Document 5 of 10 for the flight (continuous acceleration, and then continuous deceleration)-would be 42 years (by the ship's clock). By the clock on Earth, 100,000 years would pass. 315. Let's assume that we managed to produce an ideal process in a photon engine and create an ideal design for tanks with zero mass (that's impossible, of course, but that only means that, in fact, the results would be considerably worse), and let's try to analyze certain parameters of such an ideal craft. 316. The initial-to-final-mass ratio would be 7 x 10sup>18reset>. That means that if the mass for the living quarters and the working areas and equipment (i.e., everything that the spacecraft carries) were a total of 100 tons, then the departure mass would be 10sup>21reset> tons. That's more than the mass of the Moon. Half of that mass would be antimatter. 317. In order to ensure acceleration equal to g, the engine would have to develop a thrust equal to 10sup>24 kgf. To produce that kind of thrust in the focus of the mirror of a photon engine, there would have to be an emission source (whose operation is based on the annihilation reaction) of around 10sup>40 erg/s. Remember that the emissive power of our Sun is on the order of 4 x 10sup>33 erg/s. Thus, in the focus of the mirror of the photon engine, we would need to ignite millions of Suns! 318. The parameters of a photon-powered ship would be considerably better is it were possible to build a hypothetical ship with a ramjet photon engine that carried only antimatter. But the analysis would show there, too, the need to achieve impossible results-in the focus of the mirror of even that engine, we would need to ignite hundreds of Suns. And with all that, there still remain the problems of time and protection from streams of gas and dust. 319. Based on today's notions of the world, we are left with the impression that we cannot solve the problem of transporting material bodies galactic distances at speeds close to the speed of light. Apparently, there's no point in charging through space and time in a mechanical structure. 320. We need to find a means of interstellar travel that does not involve the need to transport a material body. In doing so, we approach an idea long used in science fiction (which need not be embarrassing, because profound ideas have more than once been expressed in science fiction literature) about the travel of intelligent beings in the form of information packages. 321. Electromagnetic waves propagate throughout the entire
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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.