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.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991 Document 5 of 10 Page 8 rocks provided no fundamentally new or valuable information to anyone (except, perhaps, geologists and geochemists). 61. Maybe some other kind of information of substance was produced? It would seem not. 62. Positive emotions and prestige for the United States- yes, of course. But "$25 billion for prestige'' (that's how much those shows cost) sounds a little absurd. And sad. After all, all the space programs that could have been performed for that immense amount of money must be written off as lost. 63. An endeavor to restore the prestige of the United States as the leader in technical progress was the main reason for undertaking the lunar program. The fact is that our country was, for a time, ahead in the matter of penetrating the depths of space: in 1957, we launched the first satellite; in 1961, we sent the first man into space. 64. How did such a thing come about? How did we get ahead, despite the immense technical potential of the United States? The fact is that launch vehicles, space vehicles, and spacecraft are manufactured in small numbers (especially back then-when space operations were beginning). It was virtually individual production, i.e., it was, in a sense, homemade. Under those conditions, leadership was determined by 'brainpower' and efficiency. It would be absurd to say that our brains were better than theirs; but we can, in fact, say that ours were no worse than theirs. And space bureaucrats and careerists had not yet managed to firmly attach themselves. So the initial conditions were roughly the same. And of course, we didn't underestimate the American engineers (although they underestimated our engineers, and, in my opinion, many Americans still do); underestimating a rival is a serious mistake. And to get some recognition in something like making it into space was something we wanted. Not expecting any directive orders from the leadership, we set our own goals. We worked diligently, without any fascile optimism. After our first successes, many Americans probably felt some discomfort, and their pride may have even been wounded. It's hard to say right now who it was that proposed landing on the Moon as a way of restoring prestige. In the final analysis, it doesn't matter. But all the same, the goal clearly wasn't worth the money spent. That's not to belittle the magnificently executed engineering work of the Americans. The point is how little the experience gained as a result of tackling and performing the lunar project was used. Over the course of the project, as a result of an immense amount of well-coordinated work, the Americans created not only the Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn 5 rocket, but also a gigantic production and experimental base: hold-down stands for testing rocket engines, equipment for preparing rockets and spacecraft for launch, etc. And
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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.