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Central Intelligence Agency · 1990-01-01 · 53 pages · text by GLM-OCR

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.

  • p. 6 …fragments fall to Earth. If the altitude of the injection orbit is low (less than 200…
  • p. 12 …Such operations include studies performed with space telescopes placed in circumsolar and near-Earth orbits and…
  • p. 15 …Inexpensive reusable transport systems for transport operations between low orbit and geostationary orbit. 126. 18. Space…
  • p. 21 …Radio telescopes in near-Earth orbits or, what is more effective, in Sun-satellite orbits may…
  • p. 24 …glance, to offer important advantages over Earth-based and orbital telescopes. 169. The last task could…
  • p. 33 …acceleration from a low, near-Earth orbit to a high, injection orbit (beyond the Earth's…
  • p. 35 …injection of mission spacecraft into a low, near-Earth, assembly orbit, and use of transport craft…
  • p. 36 …communications with Earth, the mission module, and the Mars rover (via the orbiter). 247. Because of…
  • p. 37 …Based on a cost of $5,000/kg to put a payload into low orbit, using…
  • p. 39 …The booster-rocket stage must lift the spacecraft from a low, near-Earth orbit to an…
  • p. 40 …from Earth in a transport spacecraft that travels between Earth and the low-orbit servicing station…
  • p. 41 …travels between Earth and orbit and the costs of operating the low-orbit servicing station, which…
  • p. 42 …cost of putting the cargo into low, near-Earth orbit were assumed to be $5,000…
  • p. 52 …Low-orbit systems of standardized satellites for environmental monitoring, studies of natural resources, and weather observations…
  • p. 53 …low orbit and geostationary orbit. 353. 10. Space robots for operations in open space in Earth…

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determined his sense of his own existence. Of course, those operations are performed according to laws that are specific to a given individual. Those laws form in the brain of an individual gradually (as a result of his experience in gaining and reprocessing information and his experience in his own activity and the evaluation of it), and they are recorded on the fields of mathematical operations and the memory units of his brain. Over the course of his life, those laws may be improved, they may be changed (just as man changes over the course of his life), and they may deteriorate. Recorded on a material carrier, they become, as it were, material. But the operations themselves, our thoughts, our experiences-they're not something that is tangible. Throughout all time, man has tried to materialize those ''intangibles'' in the form of sounds, words, stories, manuscripts, and books. But they have always been only shadows, weak reflections of those ''intangibles.''

327. The overwhelming majority of people-almost all and almost always-have not made the distinction between their 'I'' and their 'body.' And it is the body that they have always tried to make things a little better for. And in general, that's necessary: without nutrition, the brain dies, the field of operations decomposes, the person disappears. At the same time, in a healthy body, the 'computer'' works with fewer breakdowns and with greater speed (because of simultaneous operations and because of better algorithms in general), and the interior is greatly resistant to external threats and complications. And the most important thing is that a healthy body means clear thinking.

328. Maybe that's why the striving to makes things a little better for the body from generation to generation has remained the main driving force of the human race. It has also resulted in predatory campaigns, the creation of new technologies, and the striving for a better organized life for society (including by means of ''Let's rob from the rich,'' which is camouflaged by ''Down with exploitation''). Homes, cars, airplanes, gas and electricity, and computers were all born out of that striving. A striving to make things a little better for the body has been and remains the prime mover in people's lives.

329. But in fact, all that is secondary. Our 'I,' our individuality, our essence, our being-that's not our material shell. There's nothing that contradicts our perception of the world in the thought that it is fundamentally possible to separate individuality and its material carrier.

330. For that reason, from an engineering standpoint, it is possible to engineer an individual whose spirit could be ''separated'' from his body, and a world could be engineered in which the individual could move almost instantaneously (in the the solar system, for

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About this file

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.