Now the Soviets had to sit back and watch the Americans take over the space station game. Skylab crews were seen cavorting inside the cavernous laboratory on the nightly news, while Soyuz was still undergoing an extensive refit. The heavily revised Soyuz would not take its first flight until 27 September 1973 and this time the crew would be wearing space suits. It was a tough job to modify the cabin to accommodate a crew of three, with suits, so for the time being, it was decided to make Soyuz a two man vehicle. It would be seven more years before the Soviets would feel that the machine was suitable for a crew of three again. In the meantime it would fly 27 times with a two-man crew between 1973’s Soyuz 12 and 1980’s three man Soyuz T3 mission.
In what now seems a bit like the tortoise and the hare, the American Skylab program burst into the limelight in 1973 and totally disappeared eight months later. Meanwhile, Soviet stamina continued to work away at fixing the Soyuz while their space station sat waiting on the ground. Five months after the Skylab crew left the US station for the last time the Salyut 3 station was launched. It was June 25 1974 and eight days later Pavel Popovich and Yuri Artyukhin arrived to establish residency. They stayed for 15 days. Then in August, Soyuz 15, carrying a two man crew, failed to dock with the Salyut and had to abandon plans for another long duration flight, returning home after only two days.
By now it had become apparent that a long proposed joint mission with the Americans might actually occur, and so frantic preparations began at TsKBEM, which had now been turned over to, of all people, Valentin Glushko. Mishin had finally been replaced after being in charge of Korolev’s empire for eight years. During his tenure the Soviets had lost two crews, lost the moon race and seen their most expensive booster disappear into the history books in clouds of flame and smoke. Mishin was not, of course, solely responsible for this, but the time had come for Glushko to finally take over his old rival’s empire. In a final act of supreme irony, Glushko had relented on cryogenic engines and was now an ardent supporter of the one thing that had caused the rift between him and Korolev over a decade earlier. Glushko would now get to preside over the most important Soyuz mission ever, the one which would show the world that the Soviets were still keeping pace with the Americans.
On the 2 December 1974 Soyuz 16 took flight in a dress rehearsal for the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission, which was slated for the following summer. Three weeks later the new Salyut 4 space station was launched and was subsequently boarded and inhabited by two crews for nearly 93 days of total occupation. After Soyuz 17 made a successful 29 day mission to the Salyut, the next designated crew were unfortunate to be the first humans to have to be ripped free of the Soyuz launch vehicle when the stages failed to separate just a few minutes into the flight. They were subjected to a 20g re-entry but the launch escape system did its job and saved their lives. It was the first ever failure of a manned launch. Their backup crew, known as Soyuz I 8B, stayed on Salyut 4 for 62 days setting a new record for the Soviets, but still somewhat behind the US Skylab 4 crew.
Finally, on July 15 1975, Soyuz 19 took off carrying veteran space walker, Alexei Leonov and Soyuz 6 veteran Valeri Kubasov. The mission was a huge success for both the United States and the USSR with both sides scoring political victories. Soyuz 19 docked with the Apollo command module using a unique tunnel that had been carried up inside the S-IVB of the Saturn launch vehicle. Leonov and Kubasov stayed in space for a total of five days and 22 hours before returning as national heroes. In another moment of irony this would be the last manned American space flight for almost six years. While the US space shuttle was only just beginning the torturous road to its first launch, the skies were open for the Soviets.
Soyuz 19 (ASTP) launch.
Twenty one more manned Soyuz missions would fly in the interim between Apollo-Soyuz and the first space shuttle flight. The Soviets would launch ever more complex space stations but always based around Chelomei’s basic Almaz structure. In June of 1976 Salyut 5 would be launched and would be occupied for 65 days, followed by Salyut 6 in September 1977, occupied for an incredible 676 days by eleven separate crews.
Soyuz 19 (ASTP) in orbit
Salyut 6 with Soyuz-T docked at left
While all of this was continuing a new cargo carrying version of Soyuz had been devised at TsKBEM. It was over 7000 kg in mass and just about 8 meters long, otherwise it looked extremely similar to a standard Soyuz. It was capable of carrying 2300 kg of cargo to the space stations in its early configurations before being upgraded to 2500 kg. The new cargo carrier was called Progress and it was first launched on January 20 1978.This simple Soyuz derivative would become one of the most successful and reliable spacecraft ever built. Forty-two Progress ships flew before it was upgraded in 1989 to carry another 100kg, this later version, Progress M, has flown over fifty flights while a version with more fuel and less cargo, the Progress MI, has flown around a dozen times, with more to come.
Flights to Salyut 6 continued until the last crew exited the station on 22 May 1981, just a month after the first space shuttle flight. This last mission was Soyuz 40 and it was also the last time that the original Soyuz configuration would fly. A temporary hiatus occurred in Soviet space flight until 19 April 1982 when the Salyut 7 station was launched. Ten crews would live aboard Salyut 7 for 812 days between May 1982 and a final excursion in March 1986. In the interim, the Soyuz-T upgrade came into its own, flying fifteen successful missions, with one more pad abort. While this long run of successful manned space flight continued, the Soviets were still up to their old tricks behind closed doors.
Progress in orbit.
Salyut 7 with Soyuz-T docked at bottom.
In 1978 Glushko had consolidated his power and was now in total control of not only TsKBEM but also his own OKB-456 engine bureau. He had also persuaded his superiors to give him Chelomei’s space station and the bureau that built it. Glushko had seen the N-1 /L3 super booster fail and then subsequently be cancelled in 1973, but now he would propose his own giant booster along with a moon base. This proposal was soon vetoed, being too big and expensive, but Glushko continued to push for bigger and better programs. In 1976 it had become abundantly clear to the Soviet leadership that the American shuttle was to become an instrument of the military and so it was decided, once again at the Kremlin level, that an almost identical shuttle would be built in the USSR.
Chelomei’s early work on a space plane design was handed over in 1965 to yet another design bureau (the Mikoyan or MiG bureau, famous for aircraft). This research continued under the name of a program called Spiral. The chief manager for Spiral was Gleb Lozino-Lozinsky. The premise for Spiral was to use a hypersonic carrier aircraft as the first stage, with a total take-off mass of about 140 tons. The orbital stage was to carry one cosmonaut and was to have weighed about 10 tons. Spiral was cancelled in 1969 but then briefly revived in 1972. In May of 1976 a full scale space plane model was built and equipped with regular jet engines. Runway and low altitude trials took place in the fall of 1977 and the prototype flew a further five times before the program was ended in 1978.
While the Spiral testing was winding down, Chelomei began work, yet again, on a 25 ton vehicle called LKS, which was to be launched on his Proton booster. Once more Chelomei’s plan was to be pushed aside, this time it was a pro gram called Buran which foiled his efforts. On February 12, 1976, a government decree was issued for the construction of a reusable space system. Inevitably the prime contractor would be TsKBEM, which now operated under the name Energia. Extensive research was done to see if there might be a better solution than that being used in the United States, but even though there seemed to be some advantage to using a lifting body wingless shape like Spiral, the more traditional winged aircraft-style shuttle seemed to be the optimum solution. The job was therefore handed over to the Mikoyan (MiG) Bureau since they had the most experience building aircraft. Mikoyan then created an entirely new sub-division, which was called Molniya, to handle the program. Gleb Lozino-Lozinsky was brought in from the Spiral program to oversee the project.
The Energia/Buran shuttle system.
The Soviet shuttle would be an almost identical copy of the American design but the orbiter would not have the staggeringly powerful (and heavy) reusable main engines. Once again this was due to Glushko’s lack of experience building truly powerful cryogenic rockets, especially those using LH2. Glushko also had never really had the support necessary to design and build anything like the solid rocket boosters used on the US shuttle. Therefore it was decided almost by default that the Soviet shuttle, now called Buran, would have to be launched by a new, enormously powerful, liquid booster stack. Conveniently, the infrastructure for operating such a gigantic system just happened to be lying unused at Baikonur. The massive assembly building and the equally enormous launch pads that had been built for the N-1 were lying idle and could be retooled to accommodate the Buran, exactly as pad 39 and the VAB had been in the USA.
Next: Part 14
Prev: Part 12
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