Work on the Almaz stations proceeded apace, but the subsystems rapidly fell behind the original schedule. 1 (ancestor of KB Salyut) divided responsibility for the system’s components. An interdepartmental commission approved the system in 1967. Almaz was to be equipped with a crew capsule, radar remotesensing apparatus for imaging the Earth’s surface, cameras, two reentry capsules for returning data to Earth, and an antiaircraft cannon to defend against American attack. Chelomei’s three-stage Proton booster would launch them both. They designed an integrated system: a single-launch space station dubbed Almaz (“diamond”) and a Transport Logistics Spacecraft (Russian acronym TKS) for reaching it (see section 3.3). On Octoberġ2, 1964, Chelomei called upon his staff to develop a military station for two to three cosmonauts, with a design life of 1 to 2 years. Chelomei’s OKB-52 organization (ancestor of NPO Mashinostroyeniye). The task of developing the first space station fell to V. However, the Korolev organization was preoccupied with preparing the Soviet entry in the Moon race with the United States. It was to have had a docking module with ports for four Soyuz spacecraft. In 1965, Korolev proposed a 90-ton space station to be launched by the N-1 rocket. Korolev’s Vostok rocket (a converted ICBM) was tapped to launch both Siber and the station modules. They would live in a habitation module and observe Earth from a “sciencepackage” module. Three cosmonauts were to reach the station aboard a manned transport spacecraft called Siber (or Sever) (“north”), shown in figure 2-2. The first space station event relevant to this discussion occurred in March 1962, when Sergei Korolev’s OKB-1 design bureau (ancestor of RKK Energia–until recently, NPO Energia) produced a report called “Complex for the Assembly of Space Vehicles in Artificial Earth Satellite Orbit (the Soyuz).” The report wasĮarth orbit of a vehicle for circumlunar flight, but also described a small station made up of independently launched modules. Space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovskii wrote about space stations as early as 1903. The space station concept is very old in Russia. The Soviet Union still achieved many more firsts: the first lunar rover, the first soft landing on Venus, the first soft landing on Mars, the first recovery of samples from the Moon by automatic spacecraft.Figure 2-1 is a space station family tree depicting the evolutionary relationships described in this section. Undaunted, the Soviet Union rebuilt its space program around orbiting stations, building the first one, Salyut, and then the first permanent home in space, Mir. The Soviet Union engaged in that race far too late, with divided organization, and made a gallant but doomed challenge to Apollo. In 1964, the Soviet Union decided to contest the decision of the United States to put the first person on the Moon. Except one, the first human landing on the Moon. The Soviet Union achieved all the great firsts in cosmonautics-the first satellite in orbit, the first animal in orbit, the first laboratory in orbit, the first probe to the Moon, the first probe to photograph its far side, the first soft landing on the moon, the first man in space, the first woman in space, the first spacewalk. At that time, few could have imagined the dramatic events that lay head. The rebirth of the Russian space program marks an important event: 50 years since the first Sputnik was launched on 4th October 1957.
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