Second-generation Salyut

Across the globe in the Soviet Union, the cosmonauts remained focused upon crewing a series of Salyut (or Almaz) space stations, flying to and from the station in Soyuz. From 1978, the mission durations began to increase markedly, supported by the regular resupply flights of Progress vehicles. These “space freighters” delivered fresh supplies of fuel, air, water, food, equipment, and other small items of hardware. Once emptied by the crew, they could be filled with trash and unwanted material for a destructive burn-up in the atmosphere, thus freeing up valuable room on board the station.

During the Salyut missions, each two-man crew had their hands full completing all the assigned science objectives while maintaining the onboard systems and keeping the facility clean and habitable. Generally, the crewing on most missions included a military pilot cosmonaut as commander and either a design bureau flight engineer on the civilian Salyut or a military engineer on the Almaz missions. There were very few equivalent scientist astronauts in the cosmo­naut team and those who were selected, even with medical background, had little opportunity to fly on a mission. When the new variant Soyuz (Soyuz T) was intro­duced, it was once again possible to plan three-person crewing on the stations. However, when a third seat was available, it was normally filled by a second engineer from a design bureau (mostly from OKB-1, the Korolev design bureau), guest cosmonauts, or physician-cosmonauts.

From 1978, a change occurred for the visiting missions to a Salyut. The first civilian cosmonaut commanders (again from OKB-1) were accompanied by a representative from the East European/Interkosmos countries for short, week-long missions. The Interkosmos cosmonauts were certainly not of the “mission special­ist” class, and were mostly military officers who were given a short course of space training for a one-flight opportunity, mainly for political-propaganda reasons (and to install foreign equipment on the Salyut). Essentially it was a Soviet way of combining the roles of the Shuttle payload specialists and manned space flight engineers that would soon be seen on the Shuttle. The Interkosmos program evolved into a series of commercial agreements with other countries, which flew in the 1980s on Salyut 7 and Mir and later developed into the so-called “tourist flights” of “space flight participants” seen on the ISS in recent years.

In September 1977, the Soviets launched the second-generation Salyut 6 station, of which much was expected. Reports indicated that the first Soyuz mission to the station would be, in part, a proud celebration of the 20th anniver­sary of Sputnik 1. So when Soyuz 25 failed to dock successfully, it came as a bitter blow and cast a shadow over the all-rookie crew. Though they were later exonerated of all blame, the die was cast and significant changes were imple­mented for future crewing policy. By October 1977 there had been 14 Soyuz manned dockings attempted with either another Soyuz or a Salyut/Almaz station since October 1968. Six of these had failed. As a direct result of the Soyuz 25 failure, it was decided that no all-rookie crew would be flown again, especially not for such an important, high-profile mission. Eventually, the criteria were relaxed, but it would be another 17 years before the next all-rookie Russian Soyuz crew would launch (Soyuz TM-19 in April 1994 with Yuri Malenchenko and Talgat Musabayev aboard).

One of the problems was that there was no leeway in the docking attempt. The stripped-down battery version of Soyuz, used on Salyut station missions since 1974, had a limited independent orbital life of just two days, barely enough to get to and from the station in the first place. Unlike Apollo 14, which took six attempts to extract the LM from the top of the S-IVB stage en route to the Moon, repeated attempts at docking for the Soyuz were out of the question. It was an expensive lesson to learn, from the point of view of wasted resources and hardware. Improvements made for the Soyuz T helped to resolve the orbital flexibility of the spacecraft, but not before another failed docking had occurred in 1979 due to a malfunctioning main engine on the Soyuz.

When the missions to the stations were successful, it added to an ever growing database of long-duration information that would enable the Soviets/ Russians to develop their space station operations with greater confidence. Round-the-clock ground support for months on end; experiences of small crews working together in restricted confines of the orbital laboratory; masses of biome­dical information and psychological data (including the stresses of command, work over long periods of orbital flight, and the difficult decision of whether to tell a crewman in flight of a family bereavement or major incident back home). All of this was essential information to the growing program and those missions yet to come.

There were also plenty of challenges to overcome and learn from. The Soviet stations were limited in air-to-ground communications coverage, due to the lack of a global tracking network. Maintenance and housekeeping chores increased as the stations got older, making it difficult to strike a balance with important and often time-critical research objectives. From Salyut 6, there was the added dimension of disruptions to the routine from visiting crews, both at arrival and after departure. Operationally, the program had to learn about the challenges (and consequences) of docking more than one spacecraft to the station core module at the same time and the dynamic stresses on the whole structure this entailed. Postflight recovery techniques and protocols following such long missions also had to be improved—valuable lessons for even longer expeditions that were already being planned.

Salyut operations during the 1970s were also evolving the cosmonaut mission training cycle. For the Yostok missions, the Soviets had created a small training

group of cosmonauts taken from the larger corps, from which they would select the prime and reserve crews. This method had been successful and continued into the Salyut program. This experience, of having several crews going through the preparation cycle for assignment as reserve, backup, or prime crew, would prove highly successful and flexible. Separate training groups were formed for visiting crews, or to evaluate new versions of the Soyuz. These experiences would be adopted over 20 years later as the International Space Station evolved—a lasting tribute to the Soviet crewing policy devised in the Gagarin era.