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
observable Universe with virtually no loss. And that may be the key to interstellar flights. If we want to stay away from mysticism, we must acknowledge that the person of today's ''organic'' man cannot be separated from his body. But we could imagine a specially engineered individual whose person could be separated from the body in a manner somewhat similar the software that can be removed from the structure of today's computers.
322. If an information package that is a complete description of his person, his individuality, could be copied from his fields of foreground operations and memories, then that package could also be sent by radiolink to a receiving station and copied into a standard material carrier (or a carrier chosen by price, or...) in which the traveler could live, act, and satisfy his own curiosity.
323. During the transmission of that package of information, the individual would not be alive. In order for him to be alive, his person-his package of information-would have to be in a material carrier. His person, or, if you will, his spirit, could exist only on material fields of operation and memory.
324. Such a means of handling the problem of flying to the stars could be behind the plots not only of modern science fiction, but also of ancient worlds, fairy tales, and legends about ascensions into the heavens and condemnations to hell, about flying saucers and worlds where people appear and then disappear, about transmigration of the soul. It could be the resolution of philosophical arguments and discussions about the essence of man, the frailty of this corporeal shell, and the essence of being. What is man? What is truth?
325. It is interesting what outstanding philosophers from different times have, through logical analysis (not based on knowledge), come to the thoroughly modern notion of the relationship between essence and the human body. The life of man is the life of his soul; it is the thought that beats in feebleness about oneself ('Who am I?' ) and about the world outside oneself and inside; it is the esthetic enjoyment of beauty and the rejection of the primitive and the untruth; it is the freedom of thought and analysis. We are here, we are living, and we are capable of reflecting on, evaluating, and reprocessing information and generating it. The rest of me, my body, is for service.
326. The brain is a field of mathematical operations on symbols, numbers, concepts, laws, and algorithms. Those operations ensure the integration of incoming information and its analysis. The algorithms that have come about in man for processing, analyzing, and evaluating information determine his esthetics and self-image, and they Not linked to a story yet.
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.