Salyut programme

wouldn't know anything about that here.

So next slide, and this is the bit on Salyut 1.

So by the late 60s, it was clear that the Soviet program was in trouble and that NASA would very likely beat them to the moon.

Combine that with the death of Korolev, the main head of OKB1, rip-ass surgery.

They're doing something, Houston.

Guys, they're shooting at us.

What do you mean they're shooting at you? It's like the moon's haunted, but instead of moon's haunted, it's Salyut's armed.

Salyut's armed.

I also believe that this could be only the second time that a single spacecraft has docked with two other spacecraft in orbit.

The first time would be a Soyuz which visited Salyut and then Mir because they were moving hardware between those two space stations as Salyut was being decommissioned.

Like Earth orbit rendezvous for lunar missions always seems to make great sense on paper until you understand the logistics of how many different spacecraft you need to manage and get into the same place.

It becomes surprisingly less trivial when you have to coordinate multiple launch vehicles and spacecraft.

Four years later, another failure involved something far smaller than a parachute.

On June 29, 1971, Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patseyev were returning from the Salyut space station aboard Soyuz 11.

During spacecraft separation, an equalization valve opened prematurely, exposing the cabin to the vacuum of space.

The air escaped in less than a minute, The cosmonauts lost consciousness rapidly and died before the capsule reached the ground, while recovery crews initially found a spacecraft that appeared to have completed its return normally.

Yeah.

And it's like, even things like Salyut 7, which were not intended to be the first multi-module space station, became that.

And there was a lot of, you know, political question about like, all right, you know, if the Soviets are permanently in space, what does that say about our ability to do space? You know, shuttle flights were only two weeks, maybe pushing on 20 days.

if you had the extended duration orbiter palette in the payload bay.

Some of the decisions that went into it were not the best human factors wise.

I guess in that sense, like the limitations on NASA, the fact that they're working with significantly less data in terms of Skylab, it's significantly more outdated.

Considering that like Salyut and Mir overlapped, you know, like Mir was ongoing for a long time as a program.

Sorry, sorry.

Even with training, a person’s eye can misjudge size and speed if only a few pixels represent an object.

The case of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Kovalyonok, who reported an unexplained object during Salyut seven resupply flight, demonstrates that even seasoned pilots can see something they cannot explain immediately.

He logged the observation in his journal, but no follow-up investigation ensued.

That’s a recurring pattern.