by Jay Chladek
More critical to long-duration spaceflight, though, was a system for reclaiming and recycling water, which could collect water from the humidity in the air as well as on surfaces and condense it back into a state for use in electronics cooling and consumption by the cosmonauts. While it was not a totally closed-loop system, it was a start; even though missions still required regular infusions of water, the new equipment helped to minimize what was needed, freeing up valuable weight and room for other cargo on the Soyuz.
The station also had an onboard shower with a flexible, plastic ringed cover capable of totally enclosing a cosmonaut using it. It was similar to what flew on Skylab. The Skylab shower was an interesting experiment but not very effective, and no shower has since flown on American vehicles. The Soviets seemed to have better success with the shower and incorporated one in all its stations from Salyut 3 to Mir.
The OPS-2 station, known to the world as Salyut 3, rocketed into orbit on 25 June 1974 and had a nominal deployment. The Soyuz rocket planned to fly the first crew was also ready to go on time, and it flew into orbit on 3 July. Commanding the mission was Vostok 4 veteran Pavel Popovich. Joining him on this flight was Yuri Artyukin, a rookie to space but not to the cosmonaut ranks. Artyukin was in training to fly the Voskhod 3 long-duration space mission when the Voskhod flights were cancelled in favor of Soyuz spacecraft development. Artyukin had only just celebrated his forty-fourth birthday when he launched to Salyut 3 and was slightly older than Popovich.
24. Salyut 3 shown docked with a Soyuz ferry. Salyut 5 had the same configuration. Courtesy of the author.
Since Salyut 3 was a military space mission, it was controlled from the Yevpatoria control center in the Ukraine instead of the Kaliningrad facility. Western observers deduced that it was not a civilian Salyut since it used military communications bands instead of the normal civilian ones. Reportedly, the cosmonauts took part in some Earth-photography research experiments to help locate natural resources within the Soviet borders. Some tests of the station’s Agat camera system also apparently took place, as some reference targets were set up at the Baikonur Cosmodrome for the station to photograph during orbital passes overhead. All indications are that the Agat system worked well, as did the onboard film-development system and the television system to wire the photographs back to the ground. Salyut 3 also included a special reentry canister on the front of the station. At the end of an Almaz mission, this canister would be used to bring home up to 120 kilograms of developed film and other items for further analysis.
Ultimately, Soyuz 14’s stay on Salyut 3 only lasted about two weeks, and the crew returned home after over fifteen days in orbit. Due to the short duration of the mission and the two-hour-a-day exercise regime, both cosmonauts were able to climb from their spacecraft without any assistance from the recovery forces. While the mission was not well publicized, it was an important milestone in Soviet spaceflight, because for the first time, a crew had launched to, occupied, and returned from a space station successfully. The new equipment worked as advertised, and Chelomei was proud of what his design bureau had achieved, even if it couldn’t be publicly acknowledged. According to reports, Salyut 3 had six more months of provisions on board to support additional crews.
Indications are that Salyut 3’s first occupation was a shakedown test of equipment as opposed to a fully operational Almaz mission. It would be about a month and a half before the next Salyut 3 crew was scheduled to fly. The Soyuz 15 crew consisted of Gennadi Sarafanov and Lev Dyomin. Both crewmembers were rookies, and little is known about them. Dyomin was the oldest Soviet cosmonaut to fly, to date, as he was forty-eight years old and held an engineering degree from the Soviet Air Force Academy in addition to his rank of colonel in the Soviet Air Force. By comparison, Sarafanov was only thirty-two years old.
The rocket carrying Soyuz 15 lifted off on 26 August 1974 and entered orbit with no problems. Rendezvous occurred as normal, but when the spacecraft closed to within 350 meters of Salyut 3, problems began to develop. The Igla rendezvous system should have made a series of low-power thruster firings to continue a slow approach to the station, but a glitch in the system made it think the station was still twenty kilometers away. The Igla commanded the Soyuz to perform a long burn instead. Sarafanov aborted the approach within a distance of forty meters since the closing speeds were far too high for a safe docking, and some accounts say the two spacecraft just barely missed one another as they passed like two aerobatic planes performing an air-show routine. One additional attempt was made at a manual approach and docking. But the Soyuz exhausted its fuel reserves, and the mission was aborted after only two days in orbit.
A post flight investigation revealed some serious problems with the Igla, and it was felt that the entire system should be overhauled and checked before the next flight. The Igla on Soyuz 15 reportedly was acting like it was miswired as it was doing long burns when it should have done short ones and vice versa. The cosmonauts should have been absolved of blame. But instead, they were given reprimands, and neither man ever flew in space again. Due to the investigation, no Soyuz ferry was available for a further attempt to dock with Salyut 3. A month later, the Salyut 3 film return canister was successfully ejected and made a normal reentry and recovery within Soviet territory.
Engineers also conducted a test firing of the station’s 23 mm cannon. While the gun could be fired with men on board, it was decided that it would be best not to risk it since the resulting jolt might cause hidden damage to the station. Plus, the hard mounting of the gun meant that the station’s orientation had to be changed to aim it at a specific target. The gun fired apparently with no problems, but it isn’t known if the gun fired on a target or not.
After recovering the film canister and firing the gun, engineers on the ground used the remaining few months of Salyut 3’s life in orbit to see how well its systems would hold up over time. Salyut 3 was ultimately commanded to deorbit and reentered Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean on 24 January 1975. There would not be a long wait for the next manned station, though, as a month before Salyut 3’s fiery destruction, a new DOS station finally made it into orbit without problems. This was Salyut 4.
Anatomy of Salyut 4
Salyut 4 (DOS-4) was almost identical to the failed DOS-3 station. The biggest external difference from DOS-1 was the new solar array configuration. DOS-3 and Salyut 4 were fitted with three large arrays capable of independently tracking the sun regardless of the station’s orientation. With these new arrays, which were based on designs planned for Chelomei’s TKS spacecraft, the station could orient itself in almost any direction while continuing to generate power. Yet the power output of the new station was not much better than that of the first Salyut with a solar array–equipped Soyuz ferry docked with it. Onboard power was still at a premium. For waste heat and regulation of internal temperature, Salyut 4 made use of a more sophisticated coolant system than DOS-1, and it could operate in a wider range of temperatures and for a longer period of time.
Internally, Salyut 4 was much the same as DOS-1, although some improvements were made. The new guidance and navigation systems allowed for independent flight with less input from ground control, while also reducing the workload of the cosmonauts on board. The systems also helped to reduce the fuel consumption, extending the onboard supplies. Salyut 4 was the first Soviet station to be equipped with a telex printer to send up instructions from the ground without the need for a cosmonaut to write down commands sent by voice. Skylab made use of a similar system; in both cases, the printers paid dividends, as instructions could be sent up while crewmembers were either asleep or engaged in other activities.
With the success of Skylab’s ATM in its solar observations, the Soviets sought to achieve similar feats in solar astronomy. In the space originally designed for the Agat camera system of the Almaz, Salyut 4 made use of a purpose-designed 25 cm focal-length solar telescope. Observation of Earth’s atmosphere would also be a big part of the Salyut 4 mission, so sever
al spectrometers and a photometer were fitted to provide data on the composition of Earth’s upper atmosphere. The data collected from these sensors during Salyut 4’s mission proved quite valuable in the study of Earth’s ozone layer when discovery of the ozone hole over Antarctica was made in 1985.
Additional onboard sensors for upper-atmosphere study were fitted to measure the density, composition, and temperature of gases encountered by Salyut 4. It was felt that this data would help in the design of future spacecraft by minimizing radio interference caused by encounters with ionized gas, as the space station can become electrically charged (similar to producing a static shock by walking over a shag carpet in the dry winter months). For celestial observations, Salyut 4 was equipped with an X-ray spectrometer and telescope system. Salyut 4 was also the first spacecraft of any type to fly a light nuclear-isotope spectrometer, which had the capability to measure both the chemical and the radioactive composition of cosmic rays.
Salyut 4 also contained a full suite of exercise and testing equipment to gather data on the cosmonauts and how they adapted to weightless conditions. This included a rubberized-leggings system called Tchibis (a Russian acronym meaning “negative pressure,” which was used by the system). The leggings were designed so that air could be pumped out in order to help combat the effects of fluid redistributing in the head and upper torso. Unlike previous negative–body pressure devices, these leggings were portable, as opposed to being fixed in one spot, but they limited the cosmonauts’ mobility. About the only activities that the cosmonauts could perform while wearing the leggings were upper-body exercises.
25. Salyut 4 featured a few differences from previous stations. Courtesy of the author.
Looking at the manifest of Salyut 4’s scientific experiments, it doesn’t seem to have been loaded with as much equipment as the first Salyut. The main reason for this is that DOS-1 was the Soviets’ first pass at a civilian station, and they took a jack-of-all-trades approach to see what would work with off-the-shelf equipment. Salyut 4 would be the first station to take advantage of purpose-designed equipment with a specific set of scientific goals in mind. Since Salyut 4 had several years of design before it finally flew, the equipment was refined to a higher level of usefulness and durability than before.
Salyut 4 was still intended for a relatively short-duration mission. The station’s on-orbit life was directly tied to the design life of its support systems and its onboard consumables. Even though Salyut 4 included the water-recycling system first flown on Salyut 3, this new station could only be loaded with a finite amount of supplies, and the Soyuz spacecraft couldn’t carry much more than the cosmonaut crew. Once the consumables ran out, that would be the end of the station’s mission.
Launch and First Crew Occupation
Salyut 4 successfully launched on 26 December 1974. Its required maneuvers to place it in an orbit one hundred kilometers higher than Salyut 1 were successfully achieved without incident. Soyuz 16 was assigned to fly a stand-alone mission to test out equipment for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, so Soyuz 17 would fly the first crew to the station. The Soyuz 17 crew was made up of cosmonauts Alexei Gubarev and Georgi Grechko. Alexei Gubarev joined the cosmonaut ranks in 1963. This would be his first spaceflight. Georgi Grechko was also flying his first mission into space. He was an engineer who worked for Korolev during the early OKB-1 days; like Soyuz 11 flight engineer Viktor Patsayev, he was originally selected as a cosmonaut to train for the lunar program.
Soyuz 17 lifted off on 11 January 1975 and achieved a successful docking with Salyut 4 the next day. There were high hopes pinned on the mission, but Soyuz 17 would not try to break the Skylab crew endurance record. Instead, the crew would set out to break the Soviet endurance record set by the Soyuz 11 cosmonauts. The positive nature of the planned mission seemed to have carried over to the ground crew during launch preparations, because once the cosmonauts entered the station, they found a sign taped to the station’s “floor” that said, “Wipe your feet.”
For the most part, things went well on this flight as the regular work schedule and equipment usage apparently caused no problems. Early in the flight, though, the crew did have to fix a critical piece of hardware. Prior to Soyuz 17’s docking, the station’s OST-1 solar telescope had been controlled automatically from the ground. Sometime during that automatic period, the control system for the telescope’s secondary aiming mirror malfunctioned and damaged the angle indicator for it. The cosmonauts had no direct way to sight the secondary mirror; without a way to determine the secondary mirror’s steering angle, the telescope, purpose designed for the station, would be useless.
The cosmonauts came up with a pretty ingenious work-around, though; they found that if they listened closely, they could hear the servomotor driving the secondary mirror and gauge approximately where it was by listening for how long the motor ran when they commanded it to move from one side to the other. Eventually they moved it into a neutral steering position and fixed it there permanently so that the telescope could still be used. The only drawback was that without the steerable secondary mirror, they would be unable to move the telescope’s observing field independently of the station. Instead, they would have to move the station itself to aim the telescope.
For exercise, cosmonauts again had use of a treadmill along with a bicycle ergometer similar to the type that flew on Skylab. To combat the effects of weightlessness by forcing muscles in the body to erect a normal standing body posture, a refinement of the penguin suit was flown in addition to a second type of suit called the Atlet. For this flight, both suits were designed with long-term wearing in mind, while the original penguin suits were designed for relatively short-duration use. Grechko wore the penguin, while Gubarev wore and evaluated the Atlet to see which was more effective.
Reports in the media indicated that everything was proceeding quite well with the two cosmonauts as they were getting a lot of work done. Indeed, their workload was so high that they were starting to eat an extra meal a day to keep up with their nutritional requirements. They were at risk of consuming some of the supplies set aside for the next crew. Eventually, the ground had to order them to ease off their workload and take some previously unscheduled rest days in order to bring the workload more in-line with a reduced diet. On 2 February the crew broke Soyuz 11’s record, but it was not publicly acknowledged, probably so as not to bring up any bad omens. Ultimately, the crew would return to Earth on 9 February after spending twenty-nine and a half days in space. The undocking, reentry, and landing took place without any problems.
Physically, the crew was in pretty good shape, although it was determined that while the exercise regime was effective, it wasn’t quite up to the task of preparing the cosmonauts for readaptation to Earth gravity. So the exercise regime was tweaked a bit for the next planned mission. For the crew of Soyuz 17, doctors also made use of a lower-body positive-pressure device to help keep blood from pooling in the lower legs of the cosmonauts during their first few days back on Earth. Neither cosmonaut suffered any long-term effects from the flight, and each man would fly again on future missions.
The “April 5th Anomaly”
For the second flight to Salyut 4, the crew of Vasili Lazarev and Oleg Makarov would ride Soyuz 18 into orbit. Both cosmonauts were already space veterans and no strangers to Soyuz, as both had earlier flown Soyuz 12’s test flight. This flight would be far from uneventful, however. Launch occurred on 5 April 1975. The performance of the strap-on boosters and the core rocket stage proceeded as normal, but a problem occurred during separation and ignition of the third stage at about five minutes into the flight.
Due to a failure of the electrical system needed to fire the locks that secured the core stage of the booster to the third stage, the locks only released on one side. The spent core stage was still attached to the third stage by half of the open-web support structure between them. When the third-stage rocket motor ignited, the two attached stages pivoted around the struts, bending the linked st
ages into a banana shape, until the third stage finally broke free. The strain of this maneuver and the off-nominal trajectory were detected by the spacecraft’s guidance computer, and it triggered an automatic abort. As part of the abort sequence, the Soyuz spacecraft used its propulsion module rockets to separate from the third stage. The Soyuz next jettisoned both its orbital and its propulsion modules from the descent module. The descent module reentered Earth’s atmosphere on a ballistic trajectory after only achieving a peak altitude of about ninety miles.
The cosmonauts experienced about 14 to 16 g’s of deceleration (with a peak of just over 21 g’s) as the craft came in at a steeper angle than it would have experienced during a normal reentry, but at least the parachutes opened without problems. After twenty-one minutes of flight, the Soyuz descent module came to rest in the Altai Mountains near the Soviet town of Aleysk, about five hundred miles north of the Soviet border with China.
The touchdown itself didn’t occur without incident either, as the craft landed on a snow-covered slope and began rolling down the hill toward a nearly five-hundred-foot vertical drop before the parachutes got snagged on some scrub trees and halted the slide. The crew knew they were going to land close to China on their descent, but they didn’t quite know exactly how close. After landing, Lazarev reportedly burned some important papers connected with an experiment he was going to conduct on orbit, as he didn’t want their contents to fall into Chinese hands. It didn’t take long for recovery forces to make contact with the cosmonauts, though, and confirm that they were still inside Soviet territory. Even when the capsule was visually located, it still took about a day before the cosmonauts could be airlifted out, due to their remote location.