Category The Story of Manned Space Stations

Salyut 6 had been an impressive step forward in space station technology and operations. Salyut 7 was the back-up to Salyut 6 and, therefore, similar in design, but it did have improved systems, and extra comforts for the crews that were likely to be aboard for much longer periods than previously. Personal selection of food items was allowed for the first time, and there was a small refrigerator for the fresh food delivered by Progress. Extra storage was provided, but it would prove to be still not enough as the life of the station lengthened.

Launched on 19 April 1982, Salyut 7 was to have a long life and more resident crews than Salyut 6. The introduction of the updated Soyuz-T spacecraft would allow more flexibility in crew visits owing to its ability to spend more time in space. It was also hoped to achieve the first operational rotation of crews, with a new crew arriving and having the station handed over to them before the old resident crew left. This would save considerable time and resources, as it meant that the station would not have to be powered down and up again by subsequent crews.

Soyuz-T 5 was launched on 13 May 1982 with the first resident crew of Valentin Lebedev and Anatoli Berezovoi—this was defined as the EO-1 crew. They were initially given light duties for their first few days in orbit as they worked their way through the tasks required to commission the new station. New experiments were set up, and the crew slowly settled into a daily routine as they awaited their first visitors. Soyuz-T 6 was launched just over a month later, and carried the first crewmember from outside the Inter-Kosmos organization, Frenchman Jean-Loup Chretien, who was to carry out a series of medical experiments. As did short-term visitors, he wore himself out, shortening his sleep periods to maximize his time in orbit, and by the time Soyuz-T 6 undocked from Salyut 7 to return to Earth, he was exhausted. However, the resident crew of Lebedev and Berezovoi were just as tired, because hosting visitors was hard work, as previous crews had found, and ground controllers gave them a few days off to allow them time to recover. In addition, the two men did not really get on that well; they had not bonded during training for the mission, but for some reason

they had not been reassigned to separate missions. Two men aboard a small space station is never going to be an easy period of time to get through, particularly when it is for such a long period of time, but this pair seemed to exploit every excuse for arguing with one another, even over trivial things. The only break for the crew came

when visitors arrived, and the next set of visitors would be more welcome than most, because it included a woman.

Soyuz-T 7 established another space triumph of sorts for the Soviets. Svetlana Savitskaya was the second woman in space after Valentina Tereshkova in 1963. It was obviously no coincidence that NASA had announced earlier in 1982 that Sally Ride would fly on board the space shuttle’s seventh mission. The Soviets wished to trump NASA’s latest public relations scoop, and assigned Savitskaya to the flight at relatively short notice. However, it is unlikely that the more liberal American Sally Ride would have accepted the flowers and floral apron that were presented to Savitskaya by her male colleagues. Her flight was relatively short, lasting only seven days before the visitors returned to Earth in the older Soyuz-T 5, leaving Soyuz-T 7 for the long-duration crew.

Alone again, the two men struggled to get along; there was a momentary panic when Berezovoi felt unwell one day during an exercise period. His illness threatened the length of the mission, and both men felt angry that having put up with each other for all this time, they might have to come home early. Ground controllers recom­mended that Berezovoi be given an injection of atropine to ease the pain, and this helped, causing him to feel much better by the next day; the mission could continue. Finally the crew had reached their personal limits, and they were allowed to return home. They had set a new endurance record of 211 days, but their landing and recovery did not go completely smoothly, as they had to spend the night on board a disabled, and cold, helicopter. This was the last straw for the two men, and in the twenty odd years since their joint flight, they have barely spoken to each other.

The launch of Soyuz-T 8 on the 20 April 1983 did not go entirely to plan. The crew of Aleksandr Serebrov, Gennady Strekalov, and Vladimir Titov were unable to dock with Salyut 7 because one of the spacecraft’s rendezvous antennas was damaged at launch; they returned to Earth on the 22 April. Soyuz-T 9 docked with the station on the 28 June carrying Vladimir Lyakhov and Aleksandr Aleksandrov. As the next long-duration crew, EO-2, they were due to receive visitors, but unfortunately the launch of Soyuz-T 10-A, again crewed by Strekalov and Titov, was aborted and the launch escape system used when the booster caught fire during the last moments of the countdown. Thus, Strekalov and Titov failed for the second time that year to get to Salyut 7, where they were supposed to add solar arrays to the station. This task would now fall to the resident crew. Following on from the success of Cosmos 1267 with Salyut 6, Cosmos 1443 had docked with the station prior to the arrival of the Soyuz-T 9 crew, and was loaded with 3.5 tonnes of supplies. During its stay, Cosmos 1443 was used to provide attitude control for the station, and to boost Salyut 7’s orbit. The re-entry module would later turn up at a Southerby’s auction in 1993. The crew set about unloading just after they arrived; they then loaded the TKS’ re-entry module with experiment results, which returned to Earth in August. They carried out the spacewalks to install the solar panels (which were cargo in the large module) just a few weeks before their return to Earth on 23 November, after 150 days in space, having received no visitors. At around this time it was noticed by the resident crew, and ground controllers, that Salyut 7 was leaking fuel from its propellant tanks, severely limiting the station’s maneuvrability. Plans were made for the next crew to attempt to fix the problem, rather than abandon Salyut 7 at this early stage.

The TOSZ—Heavy Orbital Station of the Earth—was Korolev’s 1961 project for a large military space station. The draft project was completed on 3 May 1961, and marked the beginning of a long struggle throughout the 1960s to get such a station built and launched. Such a station required, of course, the N-1 rocket, the only rocket with anything like the payload lifting capacity required for such a large and heavy object.

1961— THE OS-1—SERGEI KOROLEV

Work on the OS-1 began on 25 September 1962. Following a meeting between President Nikita Khrushchev and the chief designers at Pitsunda, Khrushchev ordered that a 75-tonne manned platform with nuclear weapons be placed into low-Earth orbit (dubbed elsewhere as “Battlestar Khrushchev’’). Korolev was authorized to proceed immediately to upgrade the three-stage N-1 vehicle to a maximum 75-tonne payload in order to launch the station. By 1965 the mock-up of the huge station had been completed. By 1969 the OS-1 had evolved to this configuration, as described in the official RKK Energia history. In 1991 engineers from Energia and other design bureaus taught a course on “Russian Manned Space” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Vladimir Karrask, the first chief designer for the UR-500 (Proton), told of a shroud that he designed for the N-1. The shroud was cylindrical—6 m diameter x 30 m long—with a very “Proton-like” blunt conical top. He indicated that it had flown on the N-1. Another engineer, S. K. Shaevich, stated that flight hardware (including a back-up) was ready for the N-1 flights. There are those who believe that the last two N-1 flights had the Karrask shroud, and possibly the OS-1 station. It is not known if any OS-1 stations actually reached any stage of completion. Although plans for the OS-1 had to be constantly deferred until the N-1 booster proved itself, this did not prevent the design team from undertaking an even more grandiose study—the MKBS—in which OS-1 derived modules would form mere subunits of a huge space complex. At any rate the termination of the N-1 launch vehicle program ended any possibility of launching the station—unless it was reincarnated as the “Mir 2” jumbo space station that was planned for launch by the Energia booster in the 1990s.

Having deciding to concentrate on the space shuttle program after the three visits to Skylab NASA lacked a space station of its own. However, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), NASA developed the Spacelab. This made available a pick and mix of a pressurized module and open pallets that sat in the shuttle payload bay to allow scientific experiments for the duration of a shuttle mission. It was obviously nowhere near as good as the long-duration experiments that could be carried out aboard the Salyut stations, but it was the closest thing possible with the space shuttle. Critics pointed out that it was impossible to make the shuttle a com­pletely gravity-free environment, as the movements of the relatively large crew, plus thrusters firings, would interfere with the results of many experiments. The project began in 1973 when NASA and ESA signed an agreement that outlined the com­ponents and responsibilities of the Spacelab project. The first engineering model of a pallet arrived at NASA in 1980, and went on to be used on the shuttle’s second flight in 1981. Most Spacelab missions could only last up to 10 days, but NASA added the Extended Duration Orbiter (EDO) pallet to the shuttle and in 1992 STS-50, a Space – lab mission on Columbia, flew a 13-day mission. The longest shuttle mission, STS-80

lasted for almost 18 days, and this represented the limit of the shuttle’s duration. In total twenty-four Spacelab missions would be flown on the shuttle, seventeen of them with the pressurized lab module, the first of which, STS-9, was launched on 28 November 1983 and lasted for 10 days.

Whilst not strictly speaking a space station component, Spacelab did shape the way NASA planned and undertook its science based missions. The crew’s schedule for these missions was extremely tight, with not a minute wasted; of course on a short mission with around the clock shifts of crew members it is acceptable and sensible to plan this way, but it would do nothing to help NASA plan for future space station operations, when it simply would not be possible to plan every last minute of the day.

The Soviets made maximum use of their new ferry craft capabilities on the 8 February 1984 with the launch of Soyuz-T 10. This time the crew numbered three due to the inclusion of a physician, Dr. Oleg Atkov, who would monitor the long – duration crew (EO-3) of Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyov during their record attempt. Kizim and Solovyov had been trained for several EVAs to attempt to fix the leaking fuel tanks. Eventually they would carry out a record six spacewalks in their efforts to fix the leaks and add solar arrays to the station. Salyut 7’s future had been assured by the skillful efforts of the cosmonauts and wisdom of the planners on the ground. Two crews of visiting cosmonauts included the first Indian in space Rakesh Sharma, and the return of Svetlana Savitskaya who would make a spacewalk this

time. Savitskaya was accompanied by Buran chief test pilot Igor Volk, who was using this flight to test a home coming Buran pilot’s ability to land his craft on a runway at the end of a long flight. Upon landing on 29 July, Volk immediately flew a MiG fighter to 21 km before landing with dead engines to simulate a Buran landing. The three-man EO-3 crew landed on the 2 October having set a new duration record of 237 days in space, which would be the longest single-crew stay aboard Salyut 7. Vladimir Dzhanibekov, who had commanded the Soyuz-T 12 mission with Savits­kaya and Volk, could not have had any idea that he would be returning to the station in less than a year, or why.

The year 1985 was to be a somewhat more complicated and dramatic year for Salyut 7 and its crews. It began when Mission Control lost all contact with the station on 11 February; it had lost all attitude control and had gone into free drift mode, making it impossible for a Soyuz ferry to automatically dock with the station. The crew of Soyuz-T 13 were dispatched on 6 June with Vladimir Dzhanibekov and Viktor Savinykh to try and determine what had gone wrong. When they rendez­voused, the station appeared to be undamaged, although it was clearly without power, there being no lights, and the solar arrays pointing in differing directions. The station was slowly rolling around its long axis, but Dzhanibekov was able to line up the Soyuz with the aid of docking controls that had been installed in the orbital module for just such a purpose. They managed to dock, and entered the dead station; it was dark and cold as it had been completely powered off. By the crews own crude estimate, the interior temperature was about — 10°C, an estimate reached by spitting on the bulkhead and timing how long it took to freeze! Clearly, they would have to wrap up to work in these conditions, and return intermittently to the Soyuz to warm up. To attempt to bring the station back to life, the crew fitted spare batteries, replacing the existing ones that would not charge back up. In the process of this work they discovered a faulty charge sensor. This sensor determined if a battery was full or in need of charging, and it had failed in such a way that the computer thought that all of the batteries were fully charged and stopped trying to charge them; as a result all of the batteries went flat, and the station died. If a crew had been on board, the faulty sensor would have been immediately detected, and replaced well before the station lost all power. Once this sensor was replaced, the task of recharging the batteries began, and the station slowly came back to life. The crew had saved the station, once again proving the value of humans in space, and proving that the Soviets were now very comfortable with repairing their spacecraft, rather than just launching new ones when something went wrong. A fact that they would be keen to underline when failures began to undermine the fledgling partnership with NASA.

Soyuz-T 14 arrived on 18 September with Georgi Grechko, Vladimir Vasyutin, and Aleksandr Volkov aboard. Vasyutin and Volkov had trained with Savinykh as the original long-duration (EO-4) crew, so when Soyuz-T 13 landed on 26 September it left behind the EO-4 crew to begin their mission. Unfortunately, during October Vasyutin became very ill; his temperature was very high (about 40°C), and the ground advised him to rest in the hope that the fever would pass. It did not get any better; in fact he seemed to get worse, and Valeriy Ryumin ordered an immediate end to the mission. In actual fact, it took the crew about a week to prepare the station for autonomous flight and return to Earth, by which time Vasyutin had become very ill indeed. Upon his return he was immediately taken to hospital, where he took a month to recover from what turned out to be a prostate infection. It was an unfortunate end to a promising long-duration mission by Savinykh, who was very disappointed to have missed the duration record. It was also unfortunate for the future of Salyut 7, which had clearly reached the end of its useful life. The rescue mission had also used a Soyuz that was to have been utilized by an all female crew commanded by Svetlana Savitskaya with two flight engineers Yekaterina Ivanova and Yelena Dobrokvashina. After the cancelation of their flight it was hoped that they might fly to Mir, but Savitskaya became pregnant in 1986, and the idea was abandoned. Ivanova and Dobrokvashina were never assigned to another mission, and both left the cosmonaut corps in 1993.

The EO-4 mission was to be the last planned long-duration flight to Salyut 7; its successor Mir had been launched on the 19 February 1986, and it seemed as if Salyut 7’s operational life was over. However, a unique mission was planned that would see the crew of Soyuz-T 15, Leonid Kizim and Vladimir Solovyov, activating the new Mir station, and then flying their Soyuz to dock with Salyut 7 to complete and collect the work not finished by the EO-4 crew. So on 5 May they undocked from Mir after six weeks aboard and transferred to Salyut 7 the next day. After 50 days aboard Salyut 7 they returned to Mir for a further 25 days before returning to Earth on the 16 July after a truly unique mission.

Salyut 7 stayed in orbit until 7 February 1991 when it re-entered the atmosphere and was destroyed. The stage, however, had been set, for Mir was now operational and offered much more flexibility than the previous Salyut stations. The best was yet to come.

The Soviets had long realised that in order to put many of their space projects into production they would require a heavy lift launch vehicle. Design studies had begun a few years earlier, but in September 1962 the official go ahead was given by the Central Committee of the Communist Party to begin the program in earnest.

The original design requirements for this giant rocket called for it to be capable of launching 75 tonnes of payload to orbit, and this dictated that the dimensions of the rocket were huge. It stood 344 feet tall, its first stage comprised 30 engines producing 43,000,000 kN of thrust, and it weighed 2,735 tonnes. The requirements were initially formed by the needs of the OS-1, but these requirements grew in the years before its first test launch in 1969. Building work began in March 1963 to create a complex of two launch pads for the giant rocket, and they were completed in 1967. The growing requirements of the Soviet lunar missions put continuous pressure on the already over-burdened N-1 design, and Korolev, and as of 1966 his successor Vasily Mishin, were forced to ask more and more of the stages and the engines that powered them. The N-1 was eventually to be capable of launching 95 tonnes; 20 more than originally specified.

The very name Mir seems to conjure images of disaster, and words like beleaguered and trouble-torn were usually associated with it, for this was the only way that this outstanding space station was ever mentioned in the popular news programs and newspapers. This image was reinforced in popular culture by Mir’s depiction in movies such as “Armageddon”. The truth, of course, was somewhat different; the facts are simple, Mir was in orbit for 15 years, and played host to over 100 cosmo­nauts and astronauts. It is true that in later years it required more maintenance than in its earlier years, most things do, but its legacy will stand for many years to come. The incidents that led to Mir’s unfortunate reputation are described in Chapter 10.

The name Mir is variously translated, but can mean “peace’’, “community”, or “new world’’; but perhaps most significant was the fact that it had a name at all, as opposed to being referred to as “Salyut 8’’. However, it soon became clear that this station was meant to be a new beginning for Soviet space stations, with a long life planned for it. Mir would embody everything that had been learned previously, and hence with a new beginning came a new name. It did not hurt that the new name would strike a welcome cord with the new General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

Unusually, Mir was launched whilst its predecessor Salyut 7 was still in orbit, raising speculation that some kind of joint operations were intended, and maybe even a docking between the two. Its launch in February 1986, barely a month after the hammer blow of the Challenger launch disaster, highlighted the Soviet Union’s relentless presence in space, and seemed to press home, cruelly, its continued progress in long-term space flight.

Mir was different from the earlier Salyut stations in an important way. Its most important addition was the four docking ports arranged around the radial axis of the front end. These would allow the station to be expanded with science modules. This, in turn, meant that the core module or base block, as it was known, had more space; it was primarily a habitat module for the two or three permanent crew. The stations

solar panels were larger than those on Salyut 7, and more panels were to be fitted shortly by spacewalking cosmonauts. The computers on board Mir were sufficiently advanced as to allow the crew more time for scientific activities; in fact, the whole station’s design reflected the fact that this station was meant to last longer than any of its predecessors.

Mir was to be activated by the crew of Soyuz-T 15, who were launched just a month after Mir was established in orbit. Two experienced cosmonauts, commander Leonid Kizim and engineer Vladimir Solovyov, were selected to not only carry out the first mission on Mir, but also to visit Salyut 7 and finish the outstanding experi­ments on that station. Once they had rendezvoused and docked with Mir, the crew found a much roomier cabin than the previous Salyut stations, which both crew­members had spent considerable time aboard. Although the physical dimensions of Mir’s base block were about the same as previous stations, the interior was much less cluttered—a reflection of the plan to add modules later for scientific research. For the first time the crew had their own individual cabins, with sleeping bag, window, and storage for personal items. The bathroom offered some privacy, and a kind of wash basin, and the table at which the crew would eat was a great improvement over earlier facilities. In all, Mir was designed with long-duration space flight in mind, and offered a level of comfort not seen on a space station since Skylab. The lessons learnt from previous station operations was also evident in the plan for the working day; it would follow a more usual five days a week schedule—with a normal working day’s dura­tion and with time of in the evening for the crew to relax or pursue their own interests. The crews were also left free to determine their own schedules for the day; a marked difference from NASA’s “plan every minute’’ approach to space flight. The Russians

seemed to understand that long-duration missions were like running a marathon; the crew had to pace themselves to keep their efficiency levels up as well as their spirits.

Kizim and Solovyov spent the next several days preparing Mir for its mission; they unpacked an already docked Progress, and generally readied Mir for long-term space flight. One Progress left and another arrived to continue the process of activation, and to ensure that Mir’s propellant supplies were topped up. As the beginning of May approached, the crew put Mir back into an autonomous operating mode; they were leaving, but not for good, they were going to Salyut 7. Transfer between two orbiting space stations had never been achieved before, or since. On 5 May 1986 Soyuz-T 15 undocked from Mir to begin the one-day transfer to Salyut 7, docking with the veteran station was easily achieved, and in fact the whole process was made to look routine. The plan was to activate Salyut 7 once more, and finish off the remaining experiments on board the station. Toward the end of the month, the crew ventured outside Salyut 7 for the first of two spacewalks to retrieve a number of external experiments and to test the deployment mechanism for a structure that would eventually be built on Mir. By the end of June the crew was ready to return Salyut 7 to solo flight, and take as much equipment back to Mir as they could pack into the orbital module of their Soyuz; they had been on board Salyut 7 for 50 days. After a trouble-free return trip to Mir, the crew settled into a routine once more, concentrating on installing the equipment transferred from Salyut 7, and on their exercise regimes in preparation for the return to Earth. It had been assumed that the crew would hand over in orbit to the next, but apparently the next crew were not yet ready, and in truth Kizim and Solovyov had run out of things to do. On 16 July they landed after an historic and successful mission that had seen them occupy two space stations for a total of 125 days.

In fact it was some time before Mir was to be occupied again. The first expansion module for Mir, called Kvant, had suffered a few delays as it was modified from its original design as an adjunct to Salyut 7. There had also been delays with the crew, originally scheduled to consist of Vladimir Titov and Aleksandr Serebrov, when Serebrov failed a medical exam they had to be replaced by their back-ups Yuri Romanenko and Aleksandr Laveikin. Titov did not seem to be a lucky man; so far his career had consisted of a failed docking attempt with Salyut 7, and the launch pad abort, and, now he had been removed from a mission through no fault of his own. Many of his cosmonaut colleagues wondered if he was cursed.

When the crew did launch on 6 February 1987, it did so on board an upgraded Soyuz design with features specifically designed for the new orbital outpost. The Soyuz-TM was a necessary upgrade to the existing Soyuz-T craft because of the new rendezvous system used by Mir called Kurs. This new system basically allowed the Soyuz to dock automatically without Mir having to change its own orientation; a great saving of the limited maneuvring fuel available on the station. In addition a new window had been added to the orbital module to allow a crewmember to directly view the upcoming docking, and the interior of both modules had been slimmed down to save weight and give the crew more space.

Yuri Romanenko and Aleksandr Laveikin arrived at the station on 7 February 1987, docking with Mir’s front port because a Progress cargo craft was already at the

rear port. It took some time for Laveikin to adapt to life in space; it was his first flight, and he said that it took the best part of a month to feel comfortable in orbit. Romanenko had no such difficulties, he had flown before, spending three months on Salyut 6, and adapted readily to the new station. Once the new crew had settled in they waited for the new module to be launched.

The first laboratory module, Kvant, was launched on 31 March 1987. As it had no propulsion system of its own, it was mated to a modified TKS serving as a tug. The tug was to deliver Kvant to its automatic docking with the rear port of Mir, its permanent home. Kvant made its first docking attempt on 5 April, but something went wrong and the module sailed past the station, with a somewhat concerned crew watching it pass Mir’s portholes. A second attempt a few days later achieved only a soft docking; when the docking probe was retracted the latches failed to lock. It was decided to get the crew to go outside and have a look. So on 11 April they ventured out and found a cloth bag full of hygiene towels that had somehow escaped from the previous Progress craft—it had blocked the hard docking, which was achieved successfully once this object was removed. The crew entered Kvant for the first time on 12 April for an initial inspection. The interior consisted mainly of equipment for an electrophoresis system for processing biological materials, and there was also substantial equipment for carrying out astrophysics observations. In addition to the experimentation equipment, there were additional devices to help with the opera­tion of the station in general. Elektron took water (whether reclaimed vapor, waste water, or urine) and electrolyzed it into oxygen and hydrogen—the oxygen for the life support system and the hydrogen vented into space. Another very important piece of operational equipment were the stations gyrodynes; these spinning flywheels were used to rotate the station as required, rather than using valuable propellant via the thrusters. The future expansion of Mir had originally been planned around the use of more Kvant sized modules, but at some point it had been decided to concentrate on modules more than twice the size at around 20 tonnes each, based on the TKS design.