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.
“Gemini 4”1 page
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 ## Document 5 of 10 Page 6 million horsepower. The danger is always clear in the mind of the developers. Even the first American spacecraft-Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo-had good rescue systems that effected the separation and swift removal of the spacecraft from a launch vehicle breaking up as a result of a failure. A fairly good emergency system for rescuing the cosmonauts during a launch-vehicle failure was created for the Soyuz craft. Twice it saved the lives of cosmonauts-once during a third-stage failure, and once during an emergency at the launch pad. 46. Design difficulties do not justify the absence of a full-fledged rescue system in the event of launch-vehicle failure. Such a system is conspicuously absent in the Shuttle system and represents its chief shortcoming. 47. After the separation of the spacecraft or unmanned space vehicle from the launch vehicle, the upper stage usually remains in orbit, gradually slowing and then entering the dense layers of the atmosphere, where it burns up for the most part, and its fragments fall to Earth. If the altitude of the injection orbit is low (less than 200 km, for example), that process takes several days. But if the altitude is high, the upper stage may remain in orbit months or years. 48. It must be said that that eventually becomes a problem. At this moment, the quantity of upper stages that remain in near-Earth orbit-along with space vehicles that are no longer in operation, connective structural elements, and fragments produced by break-ups or accidents involving space vehicles-is such that the danger of a collision with them has become comparable to the danger of a collision between meteors and long-duration space vehicles, spacecraft, or orbital stations. That is why an urgency attaches to the problem of using injection profiles in which the upper stage of the rocket does not remain in orbit. Just such a profile is used in the Shuttle system: after the second stage shuts down, the fuel tank separates from the craft and returns to the atmosphere, and the intact remains fall into a specific region of the ocean. That is how launches should be done in the future. A similar requirement should naturally be imposed on the design of space vehicles, so that just before they shut down, they are ``pushed'' from orbit, and after their stay and maneuvers, no structural parts or fragments whatsoever remain in orbit and there is no gradual build-up of dangerous (deadly!) garbage in near-Earth orbits. 49. Based on all the above, the following recommendations need to be made for orbital injection systems: 50. Use of rockets that operate on toxic components is extremely undesirable, at least for putting manned craft into orbit.
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.