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 space robots is a an idea whose time has come. Robots would be more effective in working in open space than is men in space suits. And operations in open space will probably expand in the coming decades. 341. The construction of large radio telescopes will enable us to make more efficient studies of the Universe. 342. What Needs to Be Done? 343. Without any pretense to making an exhaustive list of the tasks facing space operations in the coming decades, I will attempt to describe the goals on which, in my opinion, it makes sense to focus our efforts: 344. 1. Low-orbit systems of standardized satellites for environmental monitoring, studies of natural resources, and weather observations, with computerized ground centers for processing the information and a computerized system for delivering the results to subscribers. 345. 2. Orbital cloud-stations as bases for experimental and construction work. 346. 3. Orbiting factories for the production of ultrapure materials and biological preparations and for performing other production processes that would be profitably or advisedly done in orbit. 347. 4. Unmanned space vehicles in an international satellite system for observing and monitoring land, sea, and ocean surfaces, air transport, and underwater activity, with a system for distribution the information to subscribers. 348. 5. Systems of radio telescopes placed in near-Earth and circumsolar orbits and operating in a single radio interferometry configuration. 349. 6. Orbital astrophysical observatories working in various spectral ranges. 350. 7. Unmanned vehicles for bringing back Martian soil and air samples (if, as a result of those operations, it turns out to be necessary to perform a manned mission to Mars, then the appropriate manned mission systems will have to be developed and built). 351. 8. Reusable transport spacecraft that are cheap (cost of delivering payload to orbit in the hundreds of dollars per kilogram) for transport operations between Earth and orbit.
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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.