Salyut 1

The station that rose from Baikonur on a Proton rocket on 19 April 1971 carried the wrong name on its hull. It had been called Zarya, meaning dawn, until a readiness review ten days before launch, when managers renamed it Salyut, partly because the Soviets had learned China was developing a spacecraft of the same name, and partly because Zarya was already the radio call sign of their own flight control center. There was no time to repaint the hull. So the world's first space station reached orbit one week after the tenth anniversary of Gagarin's flight, wearing a name it no longer carried.

Salyut weighed about 18.4 tonnes and offered roughly 99 cubic metres of habitable volume, with workstations, scientific equipment including the Orion 1 ultraviolet telescope, and a planned six-month operational life. Getting people inside proved harder than building it. Soyuz 10 arrived in late April 1971, but its docking mechanism never achieved a hard seal; after five and a half hours attached to the station, its three disappointed cosmonauts flew home without ever opening the hatch.

Soyuz 11 succeeded in June. Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev lived and worked aboard for more than three weeks, the longest human spaceflight yet flown, operating the telescope and running experiments, before their return ended in tragedy when their capsule depressurized before reentry. No crew ever visited Salyut again. Controllers commanded the empty station into a destructive reentry over the Pacific on 11 October 1971, 175 days after launch, but the idea it proved, a long-duration laboratory in orbit, has outlived it by more than half a century.