While America dreamed of Star Wars, the USSR had already spent two decades keeping a real fortress in orbit—complete with an actual cannon—and no one knew a thing.
🔍 January 24, 1975, 14:30 Moscow time. At an altitude of 270 kilometers over the Pacific Ocean, an event occurred that officially never happened. The orbital station Salyut-3 turned its nose into the direction of travel, and from its hull erupted a burst of 23-millimeter shells—20 rounds at a rate of 1,800 rounds per minute. The casings didn’t scatter into space—they were collected in a special tray, because in a vacuum, every discarded part becomes an orbital mine. The station shuddered from the recoil, but the gyroscopes kept it on course. No one was on board—the crew of Pavel Popovich and Yuri Artyukhin had left the station four months earlier. This was the final chord of the Almaz program: the first and only combat test of space-based weaponry in human history. The world would only learn of it twenty-three years later.
🎯 The story began in 1964, when the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers of the USSR approved a decree to create a manned orbital station for military purposes. Vladimir Chelomei of OKB-52 was tasked with building not just a space laboratory, but a real fortress—equipped with optical reconnaissance, radio interception systems, and, critically, self-defense capabilities. The logic was ironclad: if the Americans developed a space interceptor or a maneuvering inspector satellite, the station had to be able to defend itself. Chelomei chose the NR-23—a modified tail gun from the Tu-22 bomber, designed by engineers Nudelman and Rikhter back in the late 1940s. Caliber: 23 millimeters. Muzzle velocity: 690 meters per second. Effective range in orbit: up to 3 kilometers. The gun weighed 32 kilograms, with a 32-round ammunition load. It was integrated into the station’s hull—4.15 meters in diameter and weighing around 20 tons—so that the barrel protruded through a special port in the skin, while the recoil was compensated by the orientation system.
🎭 The first Almaz station launched into orbit on April 3, 1973, under the name Salyut-2 (cipher OPS-1, 11F71). The official TASS press release announced the launch of another scientific laboratory under the Salyut program—no mention of its military purpose, no hint of cameras capable of resolving objects as small as 30 centimeters from an altitude of 250 kilometers. After 11 days, the station failed: decompression due to a control system malfunction, loss of orientation, debris from a fuel tank. Chelomei chalked up the accident to sabotage in the production chain—things had gone wrong too quickly. No investigation was conducted in open sources, because the station "did not exist."
🛰️ June 25, 1974. Salyut-3 (OPS-2, 11F71B)—an upgraded version with refined life-support systems and that very NR-23 cannon, mounted in the lower part of the hull—reached orbit. On July 3, Pavel Popovich and Yuri Artyukhin docked with the station aboard Soyuz-14. Their mission lasted 15 days—they conducted photo reconnaissance of U.S., Chinese, and European territories, tested radio interception systems, and practiced aiming optical systems. Popovich later recalled that inside the station, it smelled of machine oil and ozone from the electronics—like a fighter jet cockpit, not a scientific lab. The cannon wasn’t tested in manned mode—the risk of station damage from recoil under manual control was too great. After the crew undocked, the station switched to automatic mode, and on January 24, 1975, the ground control center in Yevpatoria issued the firing command. The shells flew into space along the calculated trajectory; telemetry confirmed the station’s stability. Mission accomplished.
🔒 June 22, 1976. Salyut-5 (OPS-3)—the last station in the series—lifted off. Habitable volume: 47.5 cubic meters. Crews worked in shifts: Boris Volynov and Vitaly Zholobov spent 49 days on board; Viktor Gorbatko and Yuri Glazkov spent 18 days in 1977. The station carried improved observation equipment and upgraded communications systems, but it had no cannon—the Ministry of Defense had decided that the single test on Salyut-3 had proven the concept, and further firings were unnecessary. On August 8, 1977, the station deorbited and burned up in the atmosphere. The program was shuttered a year later—1978 marked the death of Almaz.
⚖️ The paradox of military cosmonautics lay in the cost. A single Almaz station required the launch of a heavy Proton rocket, months of crew training, regular resupply cargo ships, and round-the-clock ground control. The program’s cost ran into hundreds of millions of rubles—astronomical sums even for the Soviet defense budget in the 1970s. The Zenit series of automated reconnaissance satellites did the same job—high-resolution imaging of territories—but at a fraction of the cost, without crews, and capable of being launched in series.
💰 Military analysts at the General Staff crunched the numbers: one cosmonaut in orbit cost 10 times more than a dozen automated satellites. Reconnaissance was conducted for 15-20 days out of 49—the rest of the time was spent on routine operations, maintenance, and crew rest. Satellites worked around the clock. The NR-23 cannon, the only advantage of a manned platform over an automated one, remained an experiment: no real interceptions, no combat situations. The Americans were indeed developing the ASAT (Anti-Satellite Weapon) program with air-launched missiles from F-15 fighters, but the technology of the 1970s wasn’t capable of precisely targeting maneuverable objects.
🎲 The decisive blow was economics. In 1976, the USSR faced slowing GDP growth, falling oil prices, and the need to modernize ground-based armaments. Space was devouring resources, and the returns were dubious. Chelomei tried to prove the program’s value, proposing versions of Almaz with nuclear reactors for power supply, expanded modules for long-duration expeditions, even rocket complexes instead of cannons—but the Ministry of Defense refused. 1978: official closure. The stations were dismantled, the documentation classified, the crews awarded medals and silence. Chelomei moved on to developing automated platforms, while military cosmonautics focused on satellites and missile defense.
🔧 The Almaz program didn’t vanish without a trace—it mutated. Life-support technologies, docking systems, and the station’s hull design formed the basis of the Zarya and Zvezda modules of the International Space Station, launched in 1998 and 2000, respectively. Zarya—a functional cargo block weighing 19.3 tons, 4.1 meters in diameter—was a direct descendant of Chelomei’s OPS. Zvezda—a service module with crew quarters, control systems, and correction engines—was an evolution of the long-duration habitable station concept. Engineers at RSC Energia (the successor to OKB-52) used 1970s blueprints, adapting them to international standards.
🌏 China went even further. The Tianhe (天和, "Heavenly Harmony") module, launched on April 29, 2021, as the core of the Tiangong (天宫, "Heavenly Palace") orbital station, bore unmistakable traces of Soviet architecture: a cylindrical hull 4.2 meters in diameter, a mass of 22.5 tons, and a pressurized volume of 50 cubic meters. China gained access to Almaz program documentation through technological cooperation with Russia in the 1990s and used it as the foundation for its national space program. Today, Tiangong hosts crews for up to 6 months, conducts scientific experiments, and—according to unconfirmed reports—optical reconnaissance, exactly what Almaz was created for half a century ago.
📌 2026. The ISS is slated for deorbit in 2030; Tiangong operates in nominal mode; Russia has announced the development of a new orbital station, ROSS (Russian Orbital Service Station), with the first module launch no earlier than 2027. Designers at RSC Energia are once again turning to Chelomei’s archives—this time seeking solutions for autonomous life-support systems and radiation shielding. No one is proposing to revive the NR-23 cannon—modern anti-satellite systems use missiles and lasers. But the Almaz principle itself—a sovereign orbital platform with military potential—is relevant again. Space is once more becoming a field of great-power competition, and the experience of the station that fired into the void over the Pacific Ocean 51 years ago is being studied by engineers on three continents. The clues never disappeared—they were just waiting for their time.