Salyut 5

Salyut 5 was a Soviet military space station of the Almaz type, launched on 22 June 1976 as the second successful flight of the first phase of the Almaz programme. Almaz 0101-2 was readied for flight in only 60 days. The station operated for 409 days and was visited by two cosmonaut crews. The Soyuz 21 crew hard-docked by hand on 6 July 1976 after the automatic rendezvous system failed, and returned early in August after the flight engineer suffered from space sickness and psychological strain. The Soyuz 23 crew was meant to dock but its long-range rendezvous system failed, and a later Soyuz 25 mission was cancelled because the station was short of attitude-control fuel. As on the earlier Almaz station Salyut 3, a parallel crew worked aboard a duplicate station on the ground, and more than 300 astrophysical, geophysical, technological and biomedical experiments were carried out. A film capsule was recovered on 22 February 1977 and the station was deorbited on 8 August 1977.