Soyuz P

Soyuz P was an unbuilt Soviet crewed combat spacecraft, a satellite interceptor studied in 1963 and also known by the designations 7K-P and 11F71. It grew out of Sergei Korolev's December 1962 draft project for the Soyuz family, which paired the circumlunar Soyuz A with military variants. As drawn, the craft had a gross mass of about 6,700 kilograms, a height of about 6.5 metres, a crew of two and 13 cubic metres of habitable volume, and was meant to launch on an R-7 family booster. Korolev's own bureau was busy with Voskhod and the N1 rocket, so the work was handed to a branch of OKB-1 in Samara under Dmitri Kozlov, where active development began in 1964. The first concept had a cosmonaut leave the ship to inspect an enemy satellite and then destroy or recover it; this was dropped as too complex and too dangerous, and the revised design was named 7K-PPK. Manned satellite interception later proved impractical and Soyuz P was cancelled, so it never flew.