Cold Open

It’s April 19th, 1971, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the USSR.

At the launch pad, an engineer presses his hand against the cold, smooth metal of the towering Proton-K rocket. He can feel the hum of the rocket’s power beneath his palm as pumps whir and machinery clicks. It's not long now until lift-off, so the engineer backs away from the magnificent machine… and hurries down the gangway to his waiting truck.

Then he speeds away from the launch pad. The engineer must drive quickly, but he’s used to this routine because this is the 32nd launch of a Proton-K rocket in the past five years. Even so, there’s more interest in this particular mission than usual. Almost two years ago, the Soviet Union lost the race to put the first man on the moon, after American Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface. But the Soviet space program has always had other goals and is about to strike back against its American rivals by sending up Salyut 1, the world’s first space station.

The engineer’s truck reaches a safe distance just in time.

Because in a fiery flash, the rocket’s engines ignite.

Fire spews from underneath the rocket and the powerful exhaust blasts a vast cloud of dust and debris across the launch pad. After a moment, the rocket begins to ascend, moving slowly at first before gaining speed and then climbing into the sky.

The engineer squints against the glare of the sun, watching until the rocket and its revolutionary cargo is no more than a speck in the sky.

The successful launch of Salyut 1 marks a much-needed victory for the USSR in the space race. Neil Armstrong may have been the first man to walk on the Moon, but the Soviets are ahead in their quest to establish a permanent human presence in Earth orbit. It’s a mission born out of competition between rival superpowers, but a new era of cooperation rather than conflict will eventually emerge after Salyut 1 blasts off the launch pad on April 19th, 1971.

Introduction

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is April 19th, 1971: The First Space Station.

Act One

It’s April 12th, 1961, in a village in the Saratov region of the USSR, ten years before the launch of the Salyut 1 space station.

Five-year-old Rita Nurskanova walks a few paces behind her grandmother, stepping carefully over the ruts in a field. Despite her young age, Rita is hard at work. Her grandmother hacks at the ground to dig a fine line of small holes, and Rita follows behind planting a potato in every one and covering with soil. But a flash of color at the edge of Rita’s vision catches her attention, so she straightens up—and then shrieks in fear.

Walking toward Rita and her grandmother through the dull, brownfield is a figure in a bright orange jumpsuit. He has a round helmet covering his face and drags a parachute behind him like a white nylon tail. Rita cowers behind her grandmother’s legs. She doesn’t know who this figure is, an American spy, or if it’s even human. But then, the figure slides up the glass visor on his helmet to reveal a handsome, smiling face.

And then in perfect Russian, the man tells them that his name is Yuri Gagarin. He’s a pilot in the Soviet Air Force—and he’s just made history. Two hours ago, 27-year-old Gagarin blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome. His spacecraft completed an orbit around the Earth before dropping back into the atmosphere. Gagarin then ejected from the capsule and landed safely in this muddy field. Now, he asks Rita and her grandmother for directions to the nearest telephone so he can call Moscow and arrange to be picked up.

Gagarin's spaceflight is a huge victory for the Soviet Union. For more than a decade, the USSR and the United States have been locked in a bitter global battle for dominance. The two superpowers have competed to develop more powerful weapons and expand their influence into other countries. Now, this Cold War has a new potential battleground: space.

Yuri Gagarin has become the first human to enter orbit. Thanks to this spectacular achievement, Gagarin is soon one of the most famous people in the world. He’s awarded numerous Soviet honors and is paraded through the streets of Moscow before being sent on an international tour. He visits dozens of countries and speaks to a meeting of the United Nations in New York.

The propaganda value of Gagarin's flight is not lost on the Americans. A month later, the USA responds by putting their own astronaut in orbit. But the Soviets don’t stand idle either. Over the next few years, they launch unmanned probes to the planets Venus and Mars. They send the first woman into space. A Soviet cosmonaut conducts the first spacewalk, and Soviet scientists place the first remote-control vehicle on the surface of the Moon. And each time Moscow proudly announces that the USSR has been the first to a new achievement, the supremacy of their space program seems more and more obvious.

But the Soviet space program is not the unqualified success it may appear. In 1967, a daring mission is launched to dock two manned spacecraft together in orbit. The first rocket reaches space without a hitch, but the second never makes it off the ground due to bad weather. But worse failures are to come. When the first spacecraft returns to Earth, the capsule makes it through the atmosphere, but its parachutes fail to open. The capsule crash lands, killing the cosmonaut inside. It gives the Soviets another first, but an unwanted one—this mission represents the first inflight fatality in the history of space exploration.

But this re-entry disaster isn’t the only setback for the Soviets. Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space, himself dies less than a year later when his jet crashes during a routine training flight. And less than four months after that, a giant unmanned rocket explodes on takeoff, destroying the entire launch pad. This further delays the Soviet effort to land a man on the Moon and paves the way for the US to win the race to the lunar surface.

So, it is Neil Armstrong and not a Soviet cosmonaut who walks into the history books when he steps onto the Moon on July 20th, 1969.

The USA will revel in the success, and Armstrong and his crewmates will embark on an international propaganda tour of their own. But the lunar landing won’t be the end of the space race. Instead, losing out on the Moon will drive the Soviets to return to an idea they previously abandoned, one they thought too ambitious and too dangerous: building a space station.

Act Two

It’s December 26th, 1969, at a research complex deep in the Soviet Union; five months after Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon.

Sitting in a dingy conference room, 61-year-old Dmitry Ustinov listens intently as a group of Soviet scientists outline their latest discoveries. Dmitry is a man of considerable power and influence. He’s one of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev’s closest allies, and he’s also a minister for the military and defense industries. Today though, Dmitry has traveled to this secretive research lab in a hope that its latest advances will give the USSR the advantage in the space race.

Dmitry smiles as the Soviet scientists announce that they now think it’s possible to build a new type of spacecraft. Instead of sending a capsule to orbit the Earth for a few days before returning, the scientists want to build a larger ship that can stay in orbit for an extended period of time: a space station.

Dmitry approves the new program, but he stresses the urgency of the mission. He has intelligence that the Americans are also developing a space station that they’re calling Skylab. Dmitry knows he and his countrymen must move fast if they’re to beat their rivals, so he insists on an ambitious eighteen-month timeframe.

The Soviet scientists work around the clock for more than a year, but finally, the new space station arrives at Baikonur Cosmodrome on schedule. The plan is to launch it into space on April 12th, 1971—the tenth anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s historic first space flight. But the final few weeks of the program are plagued by technical problems, and the launch of the space station is delayed for a week. Soviet leaders then throw an extra wrench in the works when they order the space station to be renamed from Zarya, meaning “dawn,” to Salyut, meaning “salute.” However, there’s no chance to repaint the unmanned capsule atop the rocket, so it blasts off on April 19th with the old name still emblazoned on the side.

Two days after this launch, another rocket blasts off from Baikonur with a crew of three cosmonauts. Their mission is to dock with Salyut 1 and stay on board the space station for three days. In orbit, the men successfully attach the two spacecraft as planned, but a problem with the hatch means they can’t open the connecting door. They return to Earth having never set foot inside the space station.

Two months pass before a fresh trio of cosmonauts are able to return to space, open the hatch, and finally board Salyut 1. But their celebrations don’t last long. As soon as they get inside, things start going wrong. First, they find the space station is filled with smoke created by a faulty ventilation system. They repair that, but then a small fire breaks out on board. Once that’s extinguished, the rest of their stay is relatively uneventful, and they return to Earth on June 29th, 1971 after spending a record-breaking twenty-three days in orbit. But after their spacecraft lands, the first rescue crews on the scene discover a horrifying sight—all three cosmonauts returned to Earth, dead. Investigators conclude that they suffocated on re-entry, due to a faulty ventilation valve.

But this tragedy is glossed over by the Soviet media. Instead, reports triumphantly focus on the mission’s achievements: with its orbiting space station, the USSR has apparently jumped back into the lead in the space race.

And after six months in orbit, Soviet engineers destroy Salyut 1 by allowing it to drop into the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up. But Salyut 1 is just the first of several Soviet space stations. Over the next 15 years, six more capsules orbit the Earth as part of the Salyut program. These stations spend a combined 4,000 days in orbit and host seventy-two different crew members. The lessons Soviet scientists learn enable them to embark on an even more advanced program, Mir, which becomes the first modular space station constructed in orbit. Launched in 1986, it circles the Earth for 15 years.

But by this stage, space exploration no longer features the same sense of competition that defined the race to the Moon in the 1960s. The political landscape in the USSR changes after the rise of the more liberal Mikhail Gorbachev. And following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the new Russian space agency is more willing to cooperate with its old enemy. American astronauts are welcomed onto Mir, and the American space shuttle docks with the Russian station. As tensions reduce between the former Cold War rivals, a brand-new program will be launched, one that will build on the success of the Soviet-era space stations. Only this time, Russian and American scientists will work together, and their achievements will be shared with countries all over the world.

Act Three

It’s November 20th, 1998, at the control center of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, seven years after the collapse of the USSR.

A Russian scientist makes one last check of an instrument panel. There’s a buzz of anticipation in the room. Because it's not long until lift-off. A large screen at the front of the room displays a Proton-K rocket on its launch pad. The Proton-K has been a workhorse of the Russian space program for more than thirty years. It was the rocket of the same model that launched the Salyut 1 into orbit, and now, this rocket is going to launch the latest successor to that first space station. The module carried by the rocket is known as the Zarya. The same name Salyut 1 was originally called. But this iteration of Zarya isn’t the latest feat of one-upmanship in the Cold War. Instead, it’s the fruit of an international effort.

Five years ago, American and Russian officials announced they were combining forces to build a new space station: the International Space Station, or ISS. They were joined in the effort by the Japanese, Canadian, and European space agencies, each organization helping contribute the manpower, expertise, and materials needed to build an orbiting, multinational research platform. Now, the first part of the ISS is ready to be put into orbit.

The Russian scientist presses a button on his console to signal to mission control that the launch is good to go. And as the countdown reaches zero, the rocket engines burst into life and the spacecraft rumbles into the air.

In the months and years that follow, fifteen other modules will join the Zarya in space to form the ISS. Since the space station welcomed its first long-term residents in the year 2000, several hundred astronauts and cosmonauts from twenty-three different countries have orbited the Earth on board. During that time, they’ve carried out countless scientific experiments. But perhaps the greatest achievement of the ISS is its symbolic value. This space station demonstrates what can be accomplished when nations join in a common endeavor—not to conquer space, but to live in and share it. Whatever tensions and disagreements there are on Earth, the ISS remains a beacon of cooperation and peace. But it would never have been possible without the lessons learned from the very first space station, which blasted off from the Soviet Union on April 19th, 1971.

Outro

Next on History Daily. April 20th, 1970. Earth Day helps spark the environmental movement and quickly grows into an international event.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.

Audio editing by Muhammad Shahzaib.

Sound design by Mollie Baack.

Music by Thrumm.

This episode is written and researched by Rob Scragg.

Edited by Scott Reeves.

Managing producer, Emily Burke.

Executive Producers are William Simpson for Airship, and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.