Almaz program

• 1. Introduction

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  The Almaz program was a highly secret Soviet military space station effort that began in the early 1960s, yet its existence was hidden behind a civilian cover story for years. Three stations were quietly launched between 1973 and 1976, each announced to the world not by their true name but as routine additions to the Salyut series. Behind that disguise sat a military reconnaissance outpost in orbit, complete with cameras, crewed crews, and something no space station had carried before or since: a working cannon. The questions worth asking are how such a program came to exist, what made it distinctive, and why, despite real achievements, it was quietly wound down in 1978.

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• 2. Chelomey's Vision

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  Vladimir Chelomey, working at the OKB-52 design bureau, built the Almaz concept as a direct response to a rival American project. The U.S. Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory had been widely covered in the American press in the early 1960s, giving Chelomey ample material to lobby Soviet leadership for a comparable program. His proposal centered on three major hardware components: the Orbital Piloted Station core, designated OPS with the internal index 11F71; the Functional Cargo Block, or FGB, intended to resupply stations from the ground; and the VA spacecraft, known in the West as the Merkur, designed as a reusable crew return vehicle rated for up to ten flights. The OPS core was designed with a maximum diameter of 4.15 meters, a mass of roughly 20 tonnes, and an internal habitable volume of 47.5 cubic meters. Crews arriving aboard a VA capsule would access the station through a hatch in the heat shield, then spend between 30 and 60 days conducting military observation and photography before returning to Earth.

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• 3. The Hidden Cannon

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  Reconnaissance cameras were expected on a spy station, but the Almaz engineers went further. Mounted on the forward belly of each station was a Rikhter R-23 cannon, a 23-millimeter rapid-fire weapon modified from the tail-gun of the Tupolev Tu-22 bomber. Its theoretical rate of fire ranged from 1,800 to 2,000 rounds per minute, with some estimates placing the upper limit at 2,600. Each projectile weighed either 168 or 173 grams, depending on the ammunition type, and left the barrel at 850 meters per second relative to the station. Because the cannon sat on a fixed mounting, aiming required turning the entire station to face a target. The weapon was tested on OPS-2, designated Salyut 3, by firing 20 rounds when the station operated in uncrewed mode; the test was conducted remotely in part because engineers worried about excessive vibration and noise during a crewed period. A planned successor weapon for the unbuilt OPS-4, called the Shchit-2, was reported to use projectiles rather than a rotary cannon design, though no photographs of it were ever published and it may never have been fully manufactured. The Almaz stations remain the only known armed, crewed military spacecraft ever flown.

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• 4. Three Stations, Mixed Results

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  OPS-1, launched on the 3rd of April 1973 and publicly announced as Salyut 2, failed within days when an accident left the station disabled and depressurized. A crew had been prepared but never flew. OPS-2, launched on the 25th of June 1974 and announced as Salyut 3, fared far better. The crew of Soyuz 14 spent 15 days aboard in July 1974; a second expedition launched in August failed to dock. The station was deorbited in January 1975 after completing its cannon test. OPS-3 entered orbit on the 22nd of June 1976 under the public name Salyut 5 and received two crews, the second staying into late 1977. It was deorbited on the 8th of August 1977, breaking up on reentry. Across all three stations, five crewed Soyuz expeditions were launched; three reached their targets and only two were judged fully successful. Together, those crews occupied Almaz stations for a total of 81 days before the Soviet Ministry of Defense concluded in 1978 that the burden of maintaining crewed stations outweighed the benefit compared to automatic reconnaissance satellites.

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• 5. Unflown Hulls

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  When the crewed program ended, seven additional station frames had already been built. OPS-4, which was meant to be the first station launched with a three-panel Mech-A synthetic-aperture radar and a reusable return vehicle, was grounded. Two of the later frames, designated Almaz-T2 and Almaz-1, were eventually repurposed as uncrewed radar reconnaissance satellites. Almaz-T2, publicly identified as Kosmos-1870, successfully reached orbit on the 25th of July 1987 with an inclination of 71.92 degrees and operated for two years, producing radar imagery with a resolution down to 25 meters before being deorbited on the 30th of July 1989. Art Dula, chairman of the private company Excalibur Almaz, described it as the first commercial radar satellite. Almaz-1, launched on the 31st of March 1991, suffered a communications antenna failure and a partially undeployed solar panel before completing 18 months of work and being deorbited on the 17th of October 1992 over the Pacific. Almaz-2, which carried a new radar promising a resolution of 5 to 7 meters alongside an optical payload capable of 2.5 to 4 meters of resolution, was never launched. Two of the remaining partially completed hulls, Almaz-205 and Almaz-206, were sold to Excalibur Almaz, a private spaceflight company, which planned to launch them as crewed stations before entering financial difficulty in 2015 and ceasing operations in 2016 without ever launching a spacecraft.

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• 6. A Design That Outlasted the Program

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  Salyut 1, which in 1971 became the first space station in the history of spaceflight, used a core module derived from the Almaz-OPS hull. Sergei Korolev's organization OKB-1 mated that hull with Soyuz-derived subsystems while competing directly with Chelomey's OKB-52, and by doing so cut development time sharply. The DOS line of station cores descended from that same hull: DOS-5 and DOS-6 formed the cores of Salyut 6 and Salyut 7; DOS-7 became the Mir Core Module; and DOS-8, the Zvezda Service Module, remains in service on the International Space Station today. The Functional Cargo Block took an equally long journey. The FGB-based Kvant-1 module was the first station module of its kind to join Mir. The Zarya block, launched in 1998, continues to function on the International Space Station. One of the Almaz-205 hulls acquired by Excalibur Almaz is now on permanent display at the Isle of Man Motor Museum, a physical remnant of the program's ambition; the location of the other hull remains unknown.

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