![]() Until 1982, the USSR orbited a total of seven space stations under the name Salyut, but three of these were actually Almaz spy stations. ![]() The bread-and-butter orbital lab was successfully launched in 1971 under the name Salyut.Īfter scoring the political points of winning the space station race, the Kremlin allowed the Almaz project to proceed, but “camouflaged” it behind the civilian space stations. So the Soviet government decided to build a small civilian outpost from off-the-shelf components of the Soyuz spacecraft and available Almaz hardware. NASA’s Skylab was scheduled to launch in 1973, which meant the USSR faced the prospect of losing the race to put the first space station in orbit. The station’s fancy payloads and sensors took longer than anticipated, and in the meantime, the idea itself got lukewarm support from the Soviet military, which was increasingly relying on unmanned satellites for all its space needs. While R-23M had been in development since the mid-1960s, the rest of the Almaz project dragged behind schedule. Although cosmonauts could fire using an optical sight in their cockpit, they had to turn the entire 20-ton station to point the cannon toward its target. The physics of space stations limited the weapon, though. The Soviet Laser Space Pistol, Revealed.The Terror of Russia’s Nuclear Submarine Graveyard.According to veterans of the Almaz project, the space cannon successfully pierced a metal gasoline canister from a mile away during its ground tests. Depending who you ask, the 37-pound weapon could fire from 950 to 5,000 shots per minute, blasting 200-gram shells at a velocity of 690 meters per second (1,500 miles per hour). For this project, Nudelman’s team developed a 14.5-millimeter rapid-fire cannon that reportedly could hit targets as far as two miles away. The USSR assigned the weapon’s development to the Moscow-based KB Tochmash design bureau, led by Aleksandr Nudelman, whose engineers had distinguished themselves with many breakthroughs in the field of aviation weaponry since World War II. Along with some state-of-the-art spy equipment, such as cameras and radar, Almaz would carry the cannon in its arsenal. The habitable outpost was intended almost exclusively for military purposes, starting with reconnaissance. The early Soviet space station project codenamed Almaz (“diamond”) became the first real candidate for defensive space weaponry. ![]() It seemed perfectly logical in the 1960s that the military and piloted spacecraft would need self-defense weapons.Ī virtual model of the Soviet Union’s secret space cannon. ![]() The fear of attack on spacecraft was real, with both sides of the Iron Curtain developing anti-satellite weapons. This is the inside story.įrom the dawn of the Space Age, the prospect of American spacecraft approaching and inspecting Soviet military satellites-which, according to the Kremlin’s propaganda, were not even supposed to exist-terrified the secrecy-obsessed Soviet military. Using that footage, we created a virtual model of the R-23M. Thanks to a Russian television show, the world caught a grainy glimpse of the space gun. Let’s nerd out over them together-join Pop Mech Pro. That gun is relatively well known, but its space-based cousin has largely remained in obscurity. Installed on the Almaz space station in the 1970s, the R-23M Kartech was derived from a powerful aircraft weapon Aron Rikhter designed the original 23-millimeter cannon for the Tupolev Tu-22 Blinder supersonic bomber. A quarter-century after the Cold War came to a close, the only cannon that actually fired in space has finally come to light. ![]()
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