Outposts on the Frontier: A Fifty-Year History of Space Stations (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)

by Jay Chladek

  For the return to Earth, the Soyuz had a backup engine designed to fire only once, continuously for the required time needed to deorbit the craft. When the deorbit time came, the engine fired but had to be turned off manually when the automatic timer didn’t shut it down. Soyuz 33 landed safely, its crew none the worse for wear after their spaceflight experience. Rukavishnikov reportedly commented that he felt as though he had been in space for a month thanks to the problems that cropped up. Neither Rukavishnikov nor his Bulgarian colleague Ivanov would fly in space again, but both were branded space heroes and awarded the standard Soviet medals upon their return.

  Because the investigation into the Soyuz 33 engine failure would take a month and parts modifications would take a little longer, Soyuz 32 would be past its ninety-day service life by the time another Soyuz was ready to go. There was also a slight risk that Soyuz 32 might have the same design fault as Soyuz 33, although it operated with no problems during its launch and rendezvous. When the next Soyuz was ready to go, the decision was made to launch it unmanned, since a ferry crew would be unable to return in the first Soyuz due to mission rules. Provided that no emergency took place that would require the crew to abandon the station, the Salyut 6 mission could continue, albeit with a suspect craft. Progress 6 was flown next in May to resupply the station, and it performed this task with no problems. Since the Progress used a different engine design, they weren’t required to go through the same engine modifications as the Soyuz.

  Once the engineers were satisfied with the final tests of Soyuz 34’s engine, it was launched unmanned on 6 June and spent the next two days flying a Progress-style rendezvous-and-docking trajectory toward the station. It docked without incident, with the modified engine working normally. A week after Soyuz 34’s arrival, the crew loaded up Soyuz 32 with 180 kilograms of material, over three times the amount they would have normally sent home during a ferry exchange with a crew on board.

  In addition to experiment results, exposed film, and materials-processing samples, the crew used the added cargo space to return some expired equipment to Earth so that engineers could evaluate how well it had performed in orbit. Without this unique opportunity, the equipment would have been dumped along with the rest of the trash in a Progress vehicle. Soyuz 32 returned to Earth on 13 June with no difficulty. After its return, the cosmonauts boarded Soyuz 34 and transferred it from the station’s aft docking port to the front docking port, using the same procedure as the Soyuz 31 mission.

  Radio Telescope Experiment

  On 30 June Progress 7 docked with the station. In addition to the normal fuel and supplies, the Progress was packed with a stowed radio telescope experiment. The folded-up parabolic dish of the KRT-10 radio telescope would be deployed in a unique fashion that would not require a space walk. After the Progress was loaded up with stowed trash, the dish was fixed to the drogue assembly of the aft docking port. The probe assembly of the Progress was not fitted and its orbital module was left pressurized. When the command to undock the Progress was given, the cabin venting pushed it away from the station without thrusters and exposed the folded dish. The Progress was then commanded to station keep with the Salyut at a safe distance in order for its cameras to monitor the dish’s unfolding.

  The KRT-10 antenna dish was ten meters in diameter when fully deployed. It was used for the next few weeks to see how well it could detect radio waves from celestial bodies. Its results were compared with a telescope bank on the ground in Crimea. For a first experiment, it provided valuable data, albeit with limited results. Power requirements on the station meant that it could not be used continuously.

  When the time came to jettison the antenna, things didn’t go as planned, and the assembly got stuck on some antennae in the back of the station like a kite stuck in a tree. Attempts to jostle it free by shaking the station with thruster firings didn’t help, either. It would have to be removed before the next visitor could dock at the aft port. A brief space walk had been scheduled for the crew to retrieve experiment packages from the outside of the station, but the crew gave an enthusiastic yes when the ground asked if they also wanted to take care of the stuck antenna. It would be the first time an EVA had been conducted to the rear of a Salyut station; while EVA handholds were setup there, nobody knew what the results would be. Repair procedures were tested in Star City’s NBT to see what methods of antenna removal could be tried.

  On 15 August Lyakhov and Ryumin got to work. After Lyakhov retrieved the experiment cassettes, Ryumin studied the problem and communicated his intent to cut the assembly away using a set of sheers. Since it was the first time a Soviet cosmonaut had attempted to do such a thing, controllers were understandably cautious. They eventually gave Ryumin a go, and he made the required snips before pushing the freed radio telescope assembly away from the station.

  Four days after conducting the space walk, Lyakhov and Ryumin returned home in Soyuz 34 on 19 August after setting a new endurance record of 175 days. They had not only shattered previous endurance records, but they also did it with no visitors to help relieve the boredom. Five-month-long station missions would soon become commonplace.

  Final Long-Duration Crew

  At the end of the Soyuz 32 and 34 mission, Salyut 6 had pretty much exhausted its original service life, but most of its onboard systems were still performing well. Just before the end of the year, a new variant of the Soyuz spacecraft was launched unmanned and made two approaches to Salyut 6 before finally docking with it. This new craft was called Soyuz T-1 (T standing for “Transport”). It was a third-generation Soyuz craft reintroducing solar arrays and the ability to fly three cosmonauts in pressure suits. The most important feature of this improved Soyuz, though, was the digital Argon computer, derived from the Argon system intended for the Almaz station a decade earlier. This new system would allow totally automated rendezvous and docking maneuvers to be performed by a Soyuz, with no input from the crew or the ground, except in an emergency. After spending one hundred days docked with Salyut 6 in a hibernation state, Soyuz T-1 was used to reboost the station’s orbit before undocking.

  For the final long-duration crew, Soyuz 35 would be commanded by Leonid Popov on his first space mission. Soyuz 13 veteran Valentin Lebedev was supposed to join him, but he suffered a bad knee injury in a trampoline accident and was scrubbed from the flight. The backup cosmonaut was considered not experienced enough, so Valery Ryumin agreed to do another long-duration mission. After a successful launch, Soyuz 35 docked with Salyut 6 on 10 April 1980. The crew got right to work doing what they set out to do, and Ryumin reportedly readapted to weightlessness like a fish to water. For this mission, the crew would do the usual experiment work. But repair and replacement of aged equipment was the priority, and systems were monitored closely for signs of breakdown. Salyut 6 was originally designed for two years of service. At the end of this mission, it would be over twice that old.

  Over the course of their stay, Lebedev and Ryumin hosted several visitors. The first, Soyuz 36, was a scheduled ferry swap in late May. Joining ASTP veteran Valery Kubasov was Hungarian Intercosmos cosmonaut Bertalan Farkas. After a week of occupancy and experiments, they returned home on Soyuz 35. The next mission was the first manned flight of the Soyuz T spacecraft. Soyuz T-2, with the crew of Yuri Malyschev and Soyuz 22 veteran Vladimir Aksyonov, launched only two days after Soyuz 35 departed from the station. The new Soyuz performed well, although Malyschev overrode the Argon computer and conducted a manual docking since he didn’t like the approach path the automatic system was taking. Postflight analysis revealed that the computer likely would have docked just fine if allowed to continue. Soyuz T-2’s crew only spent three days on board before departing. These visits in rapid succession earned the station the nickname Hotel Salyut.

  Soyuz T-2 was also the first mission use of a new version of the Sokol pressure suit. This version of the Sokol streamlined the design and cut the flight weight of each suit to only eight kilograms. It could be donned more quickly in emergenci
es, was easier for crewmembers to operate in, and its redesigned helmet and torso allowed it to be tailor fit to a larger range of body types. The revised Sokol suit continues to be used in the ISS program to this day, with over three decades of successful service under its belt.

  After the T-2 crew left, Lebedev and Ryumin moved the Soyuz 36 up to the front docking port. A Progress delivered yet more supplies to the station, including a color television monitor to replace the black-and-white one used previously for two-way visual air-to-ground transmissions. On this monitor, the crew got to watch and take part in the opening ceremonies of the 1980 Olympic Games held in Moscow, but it didn’t receive much coverage internationally since many Western nations boycotted the games after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

  On 25 July Soyuz 37, with Viktor Gorbatko in command and Vietnamese Intercosmos cosmonaut Phạm Tuân in accompaniment, docked with the station to conduct a ferry swap, replacing Soyuz 36 with a fresh spacecraft. Tuân was the first space traveler of Asian descent and the first research cosmonaut to not come from a member nation of the Warsaw Pact. Tuân was a MiG-21 pilot who had flown in the Vietnam War. The primary experiments Tuân conducted were photographic surveys of Vietnam’s water features for mapping purposes using the MKF-6M camera. The visitors returned home a few days later.

  On 19 September Lebedev and Ryumin hosted their final visitors as Soyuz 38 docked at the aft port with Salyut 6 veteran Yuri Romanenko in command and the first Cuban cosmonaut, Arnaldo Tamayo Méndez, as his passenger. Méndez was the first space traveler to Salyut from a country in the Western Hemisphere and the first of African descent. Due to the orbit of Salyut 6 and because of mission-recovery constraints that required daylight in Kazakhstan for a Soyuz return, there were no daylight opportunities for Méndez to use the MKF-6M system to conduct a photographic survey of Cuba, so those images were taken after he had left. Soyuz 38 departed with its launching crew since the resident Salyut crew would soon return home themselves.

  The Progress 11 spacecraft docked with the station just before the crew left. After transferring its fuel, it was left docked with Salyut to conduct station reboosts while engineers evaluated sending additional crews to visit. Things were in remarkably good shape on the station when Lebedev and Ryumin returned home on 11 October 1980, and both men amazed the recovery forces by climbing out of the capsule and walking to their reclined recovery seats without assistance after 185 days in orbit. Part of this was due to the physical labor required during their repair work. After two back-to-back long-duration flights, Ryumin was in excellent physical shape. Doctors were encouraged by the findings.

  Final Salyut 6 Missions

  For the final two missions to Salyut 6, the goal was to see if intensive maintenance could be undertaken to perhaps extend its service life even further. Soyuz T-3 launched on 27 November 1980 with a crew made up of rookies Leonid Kizim and Gennadi Strekalov plus Soyuz 18A and Salyut 4 veteran Oleg Makarov. This was the first three-person Soyuz crew since Soyuz 11. Konstantin Feoktistov himself had hoped to fly, as he had been involved heavily in the mission planning. But he was disqualified from the flight on medical grounds, so Strekalov took his place. The Soyuz ferry was allowed to conduct an automatic docking on its own with the new Argon computer system and did so without any mishap.

  The crew’s prime task was to service the station’s glycol coolant loops. The old system was showing signs of failure and was not designed for repair in orbit. Accessing it involved pulling up panels and insulation blankets to get at the pipes, which the crew did with some difficulty since the lines were located in places not meant for servicing. The plan was to completely replace the station’s original coolant circulation pump with a new one, and the crew did that by cutting into the original coolant lines to bypass the old unit. This was risky work since glycol coolant can cause kidney damage if ingested, and glycol contamination in the cabin could force the station to be abandoned. However, the crew was able to finish their tasks safely. With that out of the way, the crew performed some scientific experiments and tested a new holographic imaging camera before returning home on 11 December. Progress 12 was sent up shortly after with more supplies and fuel to keep the station’s orbit stable until the next mission.

  Before the next crew could depart for Salyut 6, one of the station’s solar arrays jammed and was no longer able to track the sun. Combined with the degradation of the remaining arrays, it meant that Salyut 6 did not have enough electrical power to keep its internal environmental systems running properly, and the station’s internal temperature dropped to only ten degrees Celsius. The next crew would try to restore the station to operational use if they could. Soyuz T-4 launched into orbit on 12 March 1981 with veteran cosmonaut Vladimir Kovalyonok and rookie Viktor Savinykh on board. The spot normally used by a third cosmonaut was occupied by equipment needed for the repair attempt.

  After docking, the crew got down to work. Thankfully, once the jammed solar array’s control system was replaced, it began tracking the sun again, and the station’s internal temperature was restored to a comfortable twenty-two degrees Celsius. After unloading and jettisoning Progress 12, the crew hosted their first visitors, the Soyuz 39 crew of Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Mongolian Intercosmos cosmonaut Jügderdemidiin Gürragchaa, for the standard short-duration visit. No Soyuz ferry swap took place.

  Two months later on 14 May 1981, Soyuz 40 lifted off and docked with Salyut 6 a couple of days later. Leonid Popov, who had flown the most recent six-month tour of Salyut 6, was in command, and joining him was Romanian cosmonaut Dumitru Prunariu. Prunariu was a scientist and conducted many space physics experiments while on board. His visit was one of the more extensive research missions of the Intercosmos program.

  Two days after Soyuz 40 returned home, Kovalyonok and Savinykh climbed back aboard Soyuz T-4 to begin their return journey. They would be the last human visitors to the station when they returned home on 24 May 1981. Salyut 6 had been occupied for 685 days. It had taught many lessons, and its achievements were a high point of the Salyut program. But its work was not yet over.

  While the Soyuz T-4 crew occupied Salyut 6, Cosmos 1267, a Chelomei-designed TKS spacecraft, lifted off from Baikonur on a Proton booster. It was the third unmanned flight test of the TKS design and flew autonomously for about a month before detaching its VA reentry capsule, which returned to Earth successfully. On 19 June the spacecraft’s FGB node successfully rendezvoused and docked with Salyut 6’s aft docking port. The pair spent the next twelve months docked, with the FGB periodically reboosting the station and showing how robust a system it was. Ultimately, Salyut 6 was commanded to reenter and burned up safely on 29 July 1982 after nearly five years in Earth orbit.

  Salyut 7 Flies

  On 19 April 1982 Salyut 7 was launched into orbit on a Proton rocket booster. The spacecraft, internally known as DOS-6, was the engineering backup to Salyut 6. The decision was made to fly it after delays were encountered with the DOS-7 station, a revised design fitted with additional docking ports. Thanks to experience gained on Salyut 6, many refinements were made to Salyut 7’s systems. Internal logistics were improved, and the life-support system was beefed up for larger crews. Progress ferry transports were also now capable of transferring water to a Salyut station, in addition to fuel, through transfer lines in the docking collar. This would free up the pressurized section in the Progress for other cargo.

  Salyut 7 was equipped with refined versions of scientific equipment that had flown previously, including an MKF-6M camera system and a holographic imaging system tested on the Soyuz T-3 mission. Plant cultivator experiments and materials-processing furnaces would be sent up later on Progress missions. As before, the station had a treadmill and a bicycle veloergometer, except the bike was bolted to the ceiling to save floor space. Improvements were made to the food packs. On prior missions, complete meals were packaged with everything in them. So if an entrée was opened, then so were the side dishes, regardless of whether or not crewmembers wanted
them. This time, the food was all packaged separately, so the cosmonauts could choose to open only what they wanted. Crews had access to a warming oven, and a small refrigerator was provided to store fresh foods.

  32. Both Salyut 6 and 7 docked with Chelomei’s TKS spacecraft. Courtesy of the author.

  To help keep the portholes on the station free from strike damage by orbital debris, they were equipped with protective shutters that could be closed when not in use. Salyut 7 was also equipped with additional EVA handholds and a rudimentary winch system that could be used to clip additional solar panels on to the larger arrays when they began to lose their efficiency from age. Several experiment packages were also placed externally on the station before launch for materials testing after long-term space exposure.

  For missions involving two-man crews, the Salyut could orbit higher than three hundred kilometers. But if a three-person crew visited, the station’s orbit would have to drop below three hundred kilometers, since the new ferry couldn’t orbit any higher with a heavy load. Fuel resupply from Progress ferries would be very critical. Salyut 7 was designed to remain operational for a minimum of four years. It was hoped that regular exchanges of crewmembers would allow for constant occupation of the station, but things didn’t exactly happen that way.

  Early Success and Visitors

  Anatoly Berezovoy and Valentin Lebedev made up the first crew of Salyut 7 when they docked Soyuz T-5 with the station on 15 May 1982. They got right to work setting up and launched a microsatellite a couple of days later. They didn’t have to wait too long for the first visitors, as Soyuz T-6 docked on 25 June with Soviet cosmonauts Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Aleksandr Ivanchenkov on board, along with French CNES (Centre national d’etudes spatiales) astronaut Jean-Loup Chrétien. While the French CNES space program was connected with the European Space Agency, France’s political contacts with the Soviet Union were more open than European countries that were part of the NATO alliance. The Soviets extended an invitation to France for Chrétien and his backup, Patrick Baudry, to train for a Salyut mission. This program was similar to Intercosmos but not connected with it.