Documents / FOIA release
(EST Pub Date) Annotation
Central Intelligence Agency · 1990-01-01 · 53 pages · text by OCR
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.
“Nature”26 pages
- p. 1 …One naturally wants to ask oneself, Just what have we succeeded in doing? What new things…
- p. 2 …weather forecasting and in warning of approaching natural disasters
16. improved maritime and airways navigation through…
- p. 4 …etc.), satellites for studying the Earth's natural resources (Landsat, Seasat), navigation satellites (like Navsat), weather…
- p. 6 …A similar requirement should naturally be imposed on the design of space vehicles, so that just…
- p. 7 …Our natural position in space research has been restored (and our prestige, too)... What we had…
- p. 9 …the delivery of cargoes to orbit with the Shuttle (never mind our own natural disaster, Buran…
- p. 10 …It's probably wrong to pit pragmatic endeavors against people's natural wish to expand the…
- p. 12 …Low-orbit systems of standardized satellites for environmental monitoring, natural resource studies, and weather observations, with…
- p. 13 …A system of platforms in geostationary orbit for global communications, television, environmental monitoring, natural resources studies…
- p. 16 …It was natural that as early as in the 1970s, someone got the idea to create…
- p. 18 …But the simplest and most natural for our purposes is to use semiconductor converters that transform…
- p. 19 …Orbital electric power plants, however, do not use up natural resources, and after several years of…
- p. 22 …On the other hand, it is natural to locate all those facilities near one another, in…
- p. 23 …It would be natural to use the base unit of the station, where the duty shift…
- p. 24 …The base would naturally have an information-and-control center, laboratories, separate cabin-apartments for the…
- p. 25 …But on the Moon, it would probably be more natural and more effective to bury the…
- p. 26 …of the base and the lunar rover. Naturally, the information-and-control center must have telephone…
- p. 27 …The base, naturally, would have to have advanced transport vehicles: lunar rovers for research expeditions, trucks…
- p. 28 …In a word, Mars is more natural and more accessible.
195. But what is still not…
- p. 29 …Of course, it would be natural to try to ''catch'' living organisms with unmanned vehicles that…
- p. 36 …the interests of the environmental monitoring and natural resources studies; for weather observations and astrophysical research…
- p. 39 …its pressurization tanks), and automatic pneumohydraulic equipment. Naturally, the vehicles that are ''clients'' of the base…
- p. 42 …of not only the irresponsible waste of natural resources and imprudent industrial and agricultural practices, but…
- p. 45 …A natural ethical norm must be affirmed in people's awareness-that no woman should have…
- p. 50 …But never mind natural selection! When because of age, health, or living conditions that instinct dies…
- p. 52 …Low-orbit systems of standardized satellites for environmental monitoring, studies of natural resources, and weather observations…
Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1991
Document 5 of 10
Page 1
Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
Status: [STAT]
Report Type: JPRS Report
Report Date:
Report Number: JPRS-USP-91-005
UDC Number:
Headline: Annotation
Source Line: 00000000
FULL TEXT OF ARTICLE:
1. What's been done so far and what may lie ahead- something of a summary of the development of the space program, and an attempt at predicting how it will develop-are what is contained in this brochure, written by one of the planet's first cosmonauts.
2. The brochure is intended for a broad circle of readers.
3. Thirty years have gone by since the first man flew into space, and 33 years since the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite. One naturally wants to ask oneself, Just what have we succeeded in doing? What new things have we learned? What have we gained that is of practical value?
4. What's Been Done So Far?
5. In terms of manned flight, we can list the following achievements:
6. We have found out that man can live and work in orbit for a year (and probably longer).
7. We have performed six lunar missions.
8. Man can work in open space (in a space suit), but his mobility and his capabilities there are extremely limited.
9. Man can do research in space, altering its programs and aims in the course of a mission. His capabilities, however, are largely determined by the equipment on board, and he cannot compete with automatic devices in terms of accuracy of execution of precision operations.
10. Manned spaceflight has not given us any fundamentally new information (other than data on man himself in weightlessness and data on the operation of the flight systems themselves in space), and we are powered by the hope for now that we will be able to do something of substance in the future.
11. We still haven't found an ''ecological niche'' in science,
Not linked to a story yet.
About this file
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. The text was read from the page images by an OCR model; expect the odd misread word. 53 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.