The Complete Book of Spaceflight: From Apollo 1 to Zero Gravity

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An early series of Soviet space stations, of which
seven were launched over a period of a decade beginning
in 1971 with Salyut 1, the world’s first space station.
The Salyuts were intended to make human
presence in space routine and continuous. As well as
doing scientific research and spacecraft maintenance,
cosmonauts tested equipment that would make space
stations more habitable. In total, the Salyut (“salute”)
program involved 32 missions and cosmonauts from
a variety of countries. The Soviet Union’s guest cosmonaut
program began in March 1978, when Soyuz
28 carried the Czech pilot Vladimir Remek to Salyut
6, and led to several firsts, including the first black
person in space—Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez of Cuba.
In 1986, Salyut 7, the last in the Salyut series, was
replaced by Mir.
History
In 1969, the Soviet space program was in crisis. While
American astronauts had reached the Moon, the
Soviet Union’s own effort to launch a Moon rocket
resulted in two disastrous explosions that put the program
years behind schedule. Many engineers working
under Sergei Korolev sought a new direction. At the
time, their competitors within the Soviet space industry,
led by Vladimir Chelomei, had begun developing
an ambitious military space station called Almaz.
When this fell from government favor, Korolev’s engineers
proposed combining Chelomei’s nascent hardware
with a propulsion unit, solar arrays, and other
equipment from the Soyuz spacecraft, to form the
basis of a purely scientific orbiting outpost. It was
suggested that this could be launched within a year of
approval and before NASA’s Skylab. In February
1970, the Soviet government officially endorsed the
program, which was codenamed DOS 7-K. At the
start of 1971, the world’s first space station, DOS 1,
was ready for launch.
Salyut 1
On April 19, 1971, DOS 1 was successfully placed in
orbit. Shortly before launch, the name Zarya (“sunrise”)
was painted on the side of the station, but the
mission staff were told to change this because a Chi-
Salyut
nese spacecraft had already been given that name. No
new name was put on the station, but the official
Soviet press christened it Salyut 1. The first crew,
Vladimir Shatalov, Alexei Eliseev, and Nikolai Rukavishnikov,
took off aboard Soyuz 10 on April 23, 1971.
In orbit, they docked with Salyut, but the Soyuz docking
mechanism was damaged in the process, preventing
the crew from entering the station. Fortunately,
the Salyut docking port remained intact. The next
crew, Georgy Dobrovoslky, Vladimir Volkov, and Victor
Patsaev, successfully entered the station on June 6,
1971, and spent a record-breaking 23 days in orbit.
However, disaster struck Soyuz 11 upon reentry when
a pressure valve opened in the descent module, allowing
the air to escape and killing the crew. Salyut 1 was
abandoned on October 11, 1971, but several successor
stations over the next 15 years helped pave the
way for Mir.
Salyut 2
By the end of 1972, a team led by Chelomei had
developed the first scaled-down Almaz military space
station. However, in order to keep the true nature of
Almaz secret, it was called Salyut 2. Legend has it that
an embittered Chelomei had “Salyut” painted on the
section that connected to the launch vehicle but was
discarded after the craft reached orbit. Following a
successful launch on April 3, 1973, the station quickly
ran into trouble: its flight control system failed and
there was a massive loss of pressure, rendering the station
uninhabitable. A government investigation into
the accident blamed the propulsion system, but Western
radar provided a vital clue to what had probably
gone wrong. Debris in the area of the spacecraft suggested
that the Proton rocket’s upper stage had
exploded in orbit. Almost certainly the station had
been punctured by a fragment from the resulting
cloud of shrapnel.
DOS 3
Despite the failure of Salyut 2, the Soviet space station
campaign continued on May 11, 1973, with the
launch of DOS 3, just three days before Skylab went
into orbit. DOS 3 featured a number of improve-