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 enterprising among us is to create artificial intelligence. We have to think about it, because it's going to happen. 336. And difficulties that are more comprehensible would come up. If we were to transmit an individual over galactic distances, we would have to create antennas whose dimensions measured in kilometers, plus transmitters with powers on the order of a 100 million kW. At the same time, if we were to effect such galactic transfers, we would have to create receiving and transmitting stations (in the radio range, for example), use unmanned space vehicles, for example, to put them at possible destination points (as a rule, not far from some star, so as to ensure that the transceiving stations would have a supply of energy). We could transport the transceiving stations, but we could only take the technology and a minimum set of instruments and robots for the manufacture of those stations at the destination. 337. The speeds of space vehicles that are now flying in the solar system are in the tens of kilometers a second. It's possible for us to achieve speeds in the hundreds or even thousands of kilometers per second. But that means that it would take millions or even hundreds of millions of years to "'transport"' the stations about the galaxy. Transporting stations at such speeds even to the closest stars, which are tens of light years away from us, would take thousands or tens of thousands of years. In that length of time, the interest in the project itself might be lost. 338. One could imagine another means of star traveling: establish communications with other civilizations; transmit to them the information on the construction of transceiving stations suitable for receiving 'our' people; transmit the information needed for manufacturing a material carrier of 'our' individual; transmit the information package with 'our' traveler; and set up an exchange of information with them. 339. Reflecting on stellar flights enables us to single out several promising areas of work that we would be wise to pursue in the coming decades. They include the following: create ever larger radio telescopes with outputs measuring in the kilometers; develop space robots and designs and ideologies for space ''beacons''; study the possibility of creating artificial intelligence; and search for channels of communications to other civilizations in the solar system. 340. Those areas are well in keeping with the modern needs of man. Work on artificial intelligence is associated with solving the problem of creating sufficiently efficient robots to replace people in dangerous production work and help us in our exploration of water areas and the underwater world and in construction. The creation of
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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.