Salyut 5

• 1. Introduction

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  Salyut 5 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the 22nd of June 1976, riding a three-stage Proton-K rocket into orbit above the Kazakh steppe. It was the last of the Soviet military's secret Almaz space stations, and it carried a designation that said almost nothing about its true purpose. To the outside world, it was part of the civilian Salyut programme. To the Soviet military, it was OPS-3, a platform for surveillance and experiments that would never be fully disclosed. Four crewed missions were planned for it. What actually unfolded was a compressed, troubled story of contaminated air, a botched docking, a propellant shortage, and a final crew racing to complete what the first crew had barely survived.

• 2. The Almaz Legacy

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  Salyut 5 was the third Almaz station to reach orbit, following Salyut 2 and Salyut 3. The Almaz design gave it a length of 14.55 metres and a maximum diameter of 4.15 metres. Its habitable interior volume was 100 cubic metres, roughly the size of a large shipping container, and it weighed 19,000 kilograms at launch. A single docking port accepted the Soyuz 7K-T spacecraft, the configuration flying at the time. Two solar arrays, mounted at the same end as the docking port, supplied its power. To return sensitive data and materials to Earth without requiring a crew, the station carried a KSI recoverable capsule. For observation work, it was equipped with Agat, a camera pointed at the Earth below. A German-built furnace called Kristall was installed for crystal growth experiments, a rare civilian science fixture on an otherwise military platform.

• 3. Soyuz 21 and the Poisoned Air

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  Soyuz 21 launched from Baikonur on the 6th of July 1976, and docked the following day at 13:40 UTC. Cosmonauts Boris Volynov and Vitali Zholobov had a packed agenda: military experiments were the primary objective, but they also studied aquarium fish in microgravity, observed the Sun, and held a televised conference with school pupils back on Earth. The mission had been planned to run longer than it did. Somewhere inside the station, a fuel leak was releasing nitric acid fumes into the enclosed atmosphere. The contamination degraded the physical and psychological condition of both cosmonauts. On the 24th of August, they made an emergency return to Earth, landing roughly 200 kilometres southwest of Kokchetav. The fumes they had breathed would shape every decision made about Salyut 5 from that point forward.

• 4. The Docking That Never Happened

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  On the 14th of October 1976, Soyuz 23 launched with cosmonauts Vyacheslav Zudov and Valery Rozhdestvensky aboard. During the approach the next day, a sensor gave a false reading, reporting lateral motion that did not exist. The station's Igla automated docking system responded as designed, firing the spacecraft's maneuvering thrusters to correct the phantom drift. By the time Zudov and Rozhdestvensky overrode the Igla system and shut it down, the thrusters had burned through too much fuel to attempt manual docking. With no way to reach the station, Soyuz 23 turned around and landed on the 16th of October, having completed none of its mission objectives. The episode illustrated how a single faulty sensor could unravel an entire mission in a matter of minutes.

• 5. Soyuz 24 and the Air Vent

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  Viktor Gorbatko and Yury Glazkov launched aboard Soyuz 24 on the 7th of February 1977, knowing the station's air had been reported as contaminated after the Soyuz 21 emergency. Their first task was to vent that atmosphere and assess the station's condition. They also conducted repairs and continued solar observation experiments before departing on the 25th of February. The brevity of the mission was not simply precautionary; Salyut 5 was running low on propellant for both its main engines and its attitude control system. The following day, the 26th of February, the KSI recoverable capsule was ejected and returned to Earth carrying research data and materials gathered across both successful missions.

• 6. The Mission That Was Cancelled

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  A fourth crewed flight had been planned for July 1977, intended to last two weeks. It would have been designated Soyuz 25, and its crew had already been named: Anatoly Berezovoy and Mikhail Lisun, who had served as the backup crew for Soyuz 24. The propellant shortage that cut Soyuz 24 short made the fourth mission impossible. Salyut 5 could not be refuelled from orbit, and without enough fuel to sustain operations, sending another crew was not viable. The spacecraft already constructed for the mission was not wasted; it was reassigned and eventually flew as Soyuz 30 to the follow-on station, Salyut 6. Salyut 5 itself was deorbited on the 8th of August 1977, burning up on reentry. Its roughly fourteen months in orbit had produced military surveillance data, crystal growth results, and a cautionary record of what a contaminated atmosphere could do to a crew.