Salyut

The Salyut program was a space program by the Soviet Union to create space stations. There were seven, single-module stations with the name Salyut that made it to orbit. An additional two stations failed during launch and were not given names starting with Salyut.

Three of these space stations were part of the Almaz series of millitary space stations, instead of the civilian Salyut program. They used the name Salyut in order to try to hide their military use.

Part of the design of the Salyut stations was later used as the basis for the core module of Mir. It was also used in the Zvezda servide module of the International Space Station. Part of the design of the Almaz stations was later used as the basis for the Kvant-1 module in Mir and the Zarya module of the International Space Station.

Name Also known as Launched Burned up
in the atmosphere
Days in
orbit
Days
with people
on board
Crew
and visitors
(total)
Visiting
crewed
spacecraft
Visiting
uncrewed
spacecraft
Mass
kg
Salyut 1 DOS-1 19 April 1971
11 October 1971
175 23 3 2 - 18,500
DOS-2
(failure)
29 July 1972 29 July 1972 - - - - - 18,500
Salyut 2 OPS-1
(Almaz military station)
4 April 1973
28 May 1973
54 - - - - 18,500
Kosmos 557
(failure)
DOS-3 11 May 1973
22 May 1973
11 - - - - 19,400
Salyut 3 OPS-2
(Almaz military station)
25 June 1974
24 January 1975
213 15 2 2 - 18,500
Salyut 4 DOS-4 26 December 1974
3 February 1977
770 92 4 2 1 18,500
Salyut 5 OPS-3
(Almaz military station)
22 June 1976
8 August 1977
412 67 4 3 - 19,000
Salyut 6 DOS-5 29 September 1977
29 July 1982
1764 683 33 18 15 19,824
Salyut 7 DOS-6 19 April 1982
7 February 1991
3216 816 26 11 15 18,900


Salyut Media