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.
## Document 5 of 10 servicing the rocket is great, and stringent safety measures must be observed. Even if the rocket and its launch systems are designed so that there are no personnel present at the launch pad after fueling operations begin and before liftoff and even if all processes that involve mating the fueling systems, checking their seals, and the fueling itself are automated, there is still always the danger that something will go wrong, and specialists will have to go near the rocket during the fueling process or after it is completed. Gas masks, special protective clothing, and highly sensitive gear for monitoring the gas composition of the air are necessary gear for personnel at the launch sites for such rockets. 41. Even for today's rockets, normal flight involves certain complexities. First stages fall back to Earth, which means that drop regions that may be dozens of square kilometers in area must be removed from public use. The situation with rockets that use toxic components is made more complex by the fact that, among other things, first stages can break up when they hit the surface, and over time the residues of the toxic components can build up in the drop regions and make their way into the ground water. 42. In a word, rocket systems in the future should be based on the use of ecologically clean components such as kerosene/oxygen or hydrogen/oxygen. 43. Moreover, we need to consider the interaction that takes place between the burning of rocket fuel and the atmosphere, particularly the ozone layer. Standard liquid-propellant rockets apparently present no danger; but in the use of solid-propellant rockets, there is the danger that the combustion products will interact with ozone, since they can be very effective catalysts of its decomposition. 44. The entirely real danger of an accident during the powered phase of flight-and, accordingly, the danger of the rocket fragments falling to the Earth along the flight path-imposes strict requirements on the choice of launch site and ascent trajectory, so that the rocket will not pass over densely populated regions. 45. The danger of an accident with catastrophic consequences always exists during the flight of a rocket. It stems from the very high concentration of energy (hundreds of tons of fuel) in the rocket and the power in the rocket engines, from the strain on the structure, and from the small number of flights of that particular model of rocket (by comparison with, say, automobiles or airplanes). The danger presented by rockets is clearly illustrated by the power inherent in the rocket engines. For example, the engines of an R7 rocket in the first stage have on the order of 10 million horsepower, and the engines of the Shuttle rocket system, on the order of 70
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.