Space station

The space station emerged from defeat. After Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in July 1969, the Soviet Union faced a strategic choice: continue the losing race to the lunar surface or redefine the competition entirely. They chose redefinition. Within months, the crewed space program shifted toward orbital stations—a domain where continuous presence could substitute for singular achievement.

Salyut 1 launched on April 19, 1971, just ten days after the intended anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic flight (technical problems caused the delay). The station was a modified military Almaz design, 65 feet long and 13 feet in diameter at its widest, shaped like a cylinder with three pressurized compartments. Two sets of solar panels extended like wings. Construction had taken barely a year—rushed by the need to beat NASA's Skylab, which would not fly until 1973.

The adjacent possible for orbital habitation had been assembling since the late 1950s: reliable launch vehicles capable of heavy payloads, life support systems tested on increasingly longer Vostok and Gemini missions, rendezvous and docking procedures proven on Soyuz, and solar cells efficient enough to power extended operations. The capsule had shown that humans could survive in orbit; the question was whether they could live there.

Salyut 1's mission proved both success and tragedy. The Soyuz 10 crew reached the station but could not complete docking. The Soyuz 11 crew succeeded, spending 23 days aboard conducting experiments—the longest human spaceflight at that time. On reentry, a valve in the descent capsule failed. The cabin depressurized. All three cosmonauts died. Soviet practice had not required pressure suits during descent. That changed permanently.

The station itself was deorbited after 175 days, burning up over the Pacific. But the Salyut program continued: seven more stations over the following decade, leading to Mir in 1986 and ultimately to the International Space Station. The final Salyut module, Zvezda (DOS-8), became the core of the Russian Orbital Segment on the ISS and remains in orbit today. The response to one space race defeat founded an entirely different domain of human presence in space—one that prioritized duration over destination.