THE TOSZ STATION—SERGEI KOROLEV

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.