Almaz

Following Salyut 5, the Soviet Ministry of Defense judged in 1978 that the time and resources consumed by station maintenance outweighed the benefits relative to automatic reconnaissance satellites.

[2][3] Vladimir Chelomei at the OKB-52 design bureau promoted Almaz as a response to the US Air Force's Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL) project.

MOL had been widely publicized in the US press in the early 1960s, which provided Chelomei plenty of material to use to lobby for a Soviet response.

[citation needed] The Almaz space station programme involved three major hardware components: The OPS would have a maximum diameter of 4.15 metres (13.6 ft), a mass of roughly 20 tonnes (20 long tons; 22 short tons), and an internal habitable volume of 47.5 cubic metres (1,680 cu ft).

[3] As with MOL/Gemini, once in orbit the crew would access the lab through a hatch in the heat shield at the bottom of the VA capsule.

[2] While the MOL was cancelled in 1969, the Almaz program was integrated into the Salyut programme and resulted in three flown space stations, two of which were crewed successfully.

This revolver cannon was modified from the tail-gun of the Tu-22 bomber and was capable of a theoretical rate of fire of 1800-2000 (up to 2600) rounds per minute.

Salyut 3/OPS-2 conducted a successful remote test firing with the station uncrewed due to concerns over excessive vibration and noise.

The partially outfitted hulls of Almaz-205 and Almaz-206 are today in the property of Excalibur Almaz, a company that plans to launch these as crewed space stations (see below).

A crew was prepared to fly to the station but an accident days after the launch left OPS-1 disabled and depressurized.

Following cancellation of the program, the Almaz station was reconfigured as an uncrewed heavy radar-carrying reconnaissance satellite.

Kosmos 1870 – On July 25, 1987, Almaz-T2, the second Almaz-T spacecraft, successfully reached orbit with an inclination 71.92 degrees toward the Equator and it was officially identified as Kosmos-1870.

After the launch a failure of the communications antenna designed to downlink the imagery via the Luch relay satellite was noted.

The private spaceflight company Excalibur Almaz bought the two partially completed Almaz-205 and Almaz-206 space station hulls from the Russian NPO Mashinostroyeniya (the former OKB-52) with the stated intention to outfit and launch them.

The needed development of propulsion systems for the VA capsule was reportedly delegated to an unnamed European organization as early as 2009.

[18] Excalibur Almaz as of January 2012[update] postponed its first launch to 2015 to be able to include more lucrative deep space capabilities like asteroid mining.