The Soviet Rocket That Destroyed Their Own Secret Space Station: 5 Largest Rocket Failures

‘Salyut’ was the name given to the Soviet Union’s program that sought to create the first-ever space station. Running from 1971 to 1986, the Salyut program was ultimately responsible for the world’s first crewed space station, despite several explosive failures along the way.

Among the many launches made as part of the Salyut program was that of the ill-fated Salyut 2, a highly secretive Almaz military space station in 1973.

The Almaz program - which ran parallel to the public Salyut program - sought to place military reconnaissance stations into orbit, disguising them as civilian Salyut stations so as not to draw attention. The Soviets envisioned Salyut 2 as the first of many such stations, but it was not to be a successful start.

The mission’s catastrophic failure can be traced to the Proton-K rocket used to launch Salyut 2 and most other Soviet spacecraft at the time. The Proton-K was one of the Soviet space program’s flagship launch assets, measuring 160 feet long and capable of delivering immensely large payloads as heavy as 50,000 pounds into orbit.

Launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on April 3rd, 1973, the Salyut 2 station successfully entered low Earth orbit. However, the final stage of the three-stage Proton-K rocket responsible for launching Salyut 2 also entered orbit near the station rather than returning to Earth as planned.

Not designed to withstand the lack of atmosphere in orbit, this third stage section began to experience unanticipated changes in tank pressure. Three days after launch, the third stage exploded, creating a deadly cloud of debris racing around the globe on the same trajectory as the station itself.

Ten days later, this cloud reached the station with a hail of debris shredding the hull and tearing off its all-important solar panels. Less than two weeks after launch - while still unmanned - Salyut 2 began to depressurize and lose altitude. On May 18th, 1973, it reentered Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean, decaying as it fell.

American estimates put the cost of a Salyut craft at around 500 million dollars and that of a Proton-K rocket - which were also used to launch the Soviet moon probes and other spacecraft - at between 60 and 70 million dollars in 1973. The total cost was equivalent to almost 4 billion dollars today, making it one of the most expensive rocket failures of all time.

The Almaz program would continue throughout the 1970s, but after three failed launches, the Soviet Ministry of Defense deemed it too costly in terms of time and resources and shut it down.

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