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 Page 9 after 1972, almost none of it was used. It was abandoned, discontinued: there was nowhere to continue to-the lunar program had turned out to be a deadend. It was an example of a clumsily chosen-more precisely, an incorrectly chosen- goal. 65. A goal involving the spending of $25 billion or even $100 billion on a grandiose space undertaking (if the country is rich and the taxpayers agree to it) is not absurd in and of itself. But one must think clearly when making the decisions and choosing the goals. 66. Roughly the same must be said about the American Shuttle program and especially about the imitative Soviet Buran program. The idea of the Shuttles consisted in lowering transportation expenditures between Earth and orbit. The goal was a correct one. But the profile and design solutions that were adopted were clearly awkward, and the plan was not fulfilled: the delivery of cargoes to orbit with the Shuttle (never mind our own natural disaster, Buran) turned out to be, to put it lightly, considerably more expensive than delivery on the expendable launch vehicles that had been used earlier. ## 67. Forthcoming Tasks in Space 68. At present, there is still no one common opinion on the most important directions to be taken in the development of human activity in space. Slogans like ''The Mars Mission-An Inspiring Goal,'' ''Let's Make an Impressive Leap Forward in the Exploration of Space,'' ''Let's Open the Future...,'' and ''Let's Explore the Solar System'' often replace well-thought-out, logical proposals in the selection of paths to be taken in moving farther forward. The most varied of programs are being proposed. 69. For example, a program linked with the American astronaut Sally Ride proposes as the principal goals for the next 50 years the creation of bases on the Moon, asteroids, and planets; systems for traveling about the solar system; and space settlements. 70. Soviet scientists working in basic sciences feel that in the next decade we should concentrate our efforts on a study of near-Earth space; research on the Earth's magnetosphere; research on solar-terrestrial relationships, the Sun, the solar corona, and Mars; and astrophysical studies with unmanned space vehicles. 71. There are proposals that are more pragmatic. They involve a program for exploring near-Earth space and are aimed at developing satellite systems of communications and television, creating satellite systems for environmental monitoring and the study of the Earth's natural resources, developing systems of weather satellites, and creating in-orbit production that is economical and efficient.
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.