Salyut Programme - History of Salyut Space Stations

History of Salyut Space Stations

The program was composed of DOS (Durable Orbital Station) civilian stations and OPS (Orbital Piloted Station) military stations:

• The Almaz-OPS space station cores were being designed since October 1964 by Vladimir Chelomei's OKB-52 organization as military space stations, long before the Salyut programme started. For Salyut, small modifications had to be made to the docking port of the OPS to accommodate Soyuz spacecraft in addition to TKS spacecraft.

• The civilian DOS space station cores were being designed by Sergei Korolev's OKB-1 organization – Korolev and Chelomei had been in fierce competition in the Soviet space industry during the time of the Soviet manned lunar programs. In an effort by OKB-1 to catch up with OKB-52, they took Chelomei's Almaz-OPS hull design and mated it with subsystems derived from their own Soyuz. This was done beginning with conceptual work in August 1969. The DOS differed from the OPS modules in several aspects, with among others extra solar panels, front and (in Salyut 6 and 7) rear docking ports for Soyuz spacecraft and TKS spacecraft, and finally more docking ports in DOS-7 and DOS-8 to attach further space station modules.

When it was realized that the later started civilian DOS stations could not only offer a cover story for the military Almaz programme, but could be finished within one year(!) (and at least a year earlier than Almaz), the Salyut programme was incepted on February 15, 1970 – under the condition that the manned lunar program would not suffer. However, the engineers at OKB-1 immediately switched from the L3 lunar lander effort, which was perceived as an dead-end, to start work on DOS – despite fears that it would kill the Soviet manned Moon shot. In the end it turned out that the Soviet N1 "Moon Shot" rocket never flew successfully, so OKB-1's decisions to abandon the ill fated Soviet maned lunar program, and to derive a DOS space station from existing Soyuz subsystems and an Almaz-OPS hull proved to be right: The actual time to the launch of the first DOS-based Salyut 1 space station from the get-go was an impressive 16 months – the world's first space station was launched by the Soviet Union, two years before Skylab or the first Almaz-OPS station flew.

Initially the space stations were to be named Zarya, the Russian word for 'Dawn'. Yet, as the launch of the first station in the program was prepared, it was realized that this would conflict with the call sign Zarya of the flight control centre (TsUP) in Korolyov – therefore the name of the space stations was changed to Salyut shortly before launch of Salyut 1.

While a total of nine space stations were launched in the Salyut programme, with six successfully manned, setting some records along the way, it were the stations Salyut 6 and Salyut 7 that became the workhorses of the program: Out of the total of 1,697 days of occupancy that all Salyut crews achieved, it were Salyut 6 and 7 that accounted for 1,499. While Skylab already featured a second docking port, it were these two Salyut stations that would become the first that actually utilized two docking ports: This made it possible for two Soyuz spacecraft to dock at the same time for crew exchange of the station and for Progress spacecraft to resupply the station, allowing for the first time a continuous ("permanent") occupation of space stations.

The heritage of the Salyut programme continued to live on in the first multi-module space station Mir with the Mir Core Module ("DOS-7"), that accumulated 4,592 days of occupancy, and in the International Space Station (ISS) with the Zvezda module ("DOS-8"), that as of 21 August 2012 (2012 -08-21) accumulated 4,310 days of occupancy. Furthermore the Functional Cargo Block space station modules were derived from the Almaz programme, with the Zarya ISS module being still in operation together with Zvezda.