Salyut & Mir

Project Summary

While the United States took a hiatus from manned spaceflight, after the three Skylab missions, to develop its space shuttle, the Soviet Union pressed on with the development of a stable, long-duration presence in Earth orbit. This presence first took the form of the series of Salyut space stations, the most successful being the science-oriented Salyut 6 and 7 stations. The Salyut 3 and 5 space stations were part of a secret project, codenamed "Almaz," that put cosmonauts aboard military space stations specifically designed to spy on the United States and its allies. This was in answer to the U.S. Air Force's planned Manned Orbiting Laboratory of the 1960s, which would have launced astronauts aboard specially modified Gemini capsules to board a space station launched by a Titan III rocket and equipped with a high-powered camera to spy on the Soviet Union. The U.S. Manned Orbiting Laboratory never flew, however.

The Russians' followup Mir space station was one of the most successful to that time, and as of July 1996, Mir had been in space and continuously manned for more than 10 years. The expansion modules that were added to the basic Mir module made the station a productive laboratory for many different types of space-related experiments and observations. Crews stayed aboard Mir for over a year, with the long-duration record of 438 days being held by cosmonaut Valeri Polyokov. In 1995, the United States and Russia began a series of joint missions where the space shuttle docked with Mir to test procedures that were used to build the International Space Station. The final manned long-duration mission aboard (Soyuz TM-29/Mir 27) returned to Earth on August 28, 1999, bringing to an end one of the most successful (even if sometimes trouble-plagued) manned space endeavours in history. Designed to operate for 3 or 4 years, Mir welcomed and served as home for Russian and international long-duration crews for an amazing 13 1/2 years.

In February 2000 it was announced that a private company called "MirCorp" had leased the Mir space stations from the Russians and was planning several commercial ventures, including space tourism at a cost of $20 million per "astrotourist" flight. On February 1, the Russians launched a new generation Progress resupply ship to Mir in the first step towards activating the station. A new crew was launched to Mir in April 2000 for a mission of 71 days. But financial difficulties of the Russian government and commitments to the International Space Station resulted in the decision to abandon Mir. The aging space station, which served for 15 years, was finally crashed into an uninhabited area of the South Pacific Ocean on March 22, 2001. The main module had completed 86,320 orbits of the Earth and had housed 104 cosmonauts and astronauts, including 7 Americans.

Missions Flown

                                 # of Flt.                          
  Date       Spacecraft Name     Crew Days      Mission/Payload     
-------- ----------------------- ---- ----  ------------------------
Salyut Space Stations
04/19/71 Salyut 1                  -     -  1 manned mission        
04/03/73 Salyut 2                  -     -  Broke up in orbit       
05/11/73 Salyut (Cosmos 557)       -     -  Broke up in orbit       
06/22/74 Salyut 3 (Almaz)          -     -  1 manned mission        
12/26/74 Salyut 4                  -     -  2 manned missions       
06/22/76 Salyut 5 (Almaz)          -     -  2 manned missions       
09/29/77 Salyut 6                  -     -  16 manned missions      
04/19/82 Salyut 7                  -     -  10 manned missions      
03/__/83 Merkur (Cosmos 1443)      -     -  unmanned test of ferry  
09/27/85 Salyut (Cosmos 1686)      -     -  Salyut 7 expansion      

Mir Space Station
02/20/86 Mir                       -     -  28 manned missions      
03/30/87 Kvant 1                   -     -  Astrophysics module     
11/26/89 Kvant 2                   -     -  Earth observation module
05/31/90 Kristall                  -     -  Material process. module
05/19/95 Spektr                    -     -  Earth sciences module   
04/23/95 Prirodi                   -     -  Earth radar module      

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Last Updated: August 1, 2009