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Wednesday, May 19, 2021
CONTINUITY: Salyut 1—The First Space Station
The basic shape of Salyut 1 was inherited from the Chelomei Almaz military space station design, which was the subject of my 1998 essay “Blazing Satellites: Guns in Space!”. The odd design, with two cylinders of different diameters, was required on Almaz to accommodate the large aperture telescope for its surveillance mission, and was carried over, not just to all of the subsequent Salyut space stations, but also Mir, the core Zarya module of the International Space Station, and the recently-launched Chinese space station core module, Tienhe. Never underestimate the persistence of a legacy design which just works—think about that every time you program in Intel x86 machine language.
Posted at May 19, 2021 12:47