Salyut 3 was launched on June 25, 1974. It was another Almaz military space station, this one launched successfully, included in the Salyut program to disguise its true purpose.
Salyut 3 and its Proton booster on the launch pad.
It attained an altitude of 219 to 270 km on launch and its final orbital altitude was 268 to 272 km. Salyut 3 had a total mass of about 18 to 19 tons. It had two solar panels laterally mounted on the center of the station and a retactable recovery module for the return of research data and materials. Only one of the three intended crews successfully boarded and manned the sation, brought by Soyuz 14; Soyuz 15 attempted to bring a second crew but failed to dock. Nevertheless, Salyut 3 was an overall success.
It tested a wide variety of reconnaisance sensors; on September 23, 1974, the station's recovery module was released and re-entered, being recovered by the Soviets. On January 24, 1975 trials of the on-board 23 mm Nudelmann aircraft cannon (other sources say it was a Nudelmann NR-30 30 mm gun) were conducted with positive results at ranges from 3000 m to 500 m. Cosmonauts have confirmed that a target satellite was destroyed in the test. The next day, the station was ordered to deorbit.
Starting with Salyut 6 and 7, a change was seen; these were built with two docking ports, which allowed a second crew to visit, bringing a new spacecraft (for technical reasons, a Soyuz capsule cannot spend more than a few months on orbit, even powered down, safely) with them.
This concept was expanded on Salyut 7, which "hard docked" with a TKS tug shortly before it was abandoned; this served as a proof-of-concept for the use of modular space stations.
After Salyut 6 manned operations were discontinued in 1981, a heavy unmanned spacecraft called TKS and developed using hardware left from the canceled Almaz program was docked to the station as a hardware test.
Salyut 1 was abandoned on Oct. 11, 1971, but several successor stations over the next 15 years helped pave the way for Mir.
The second Almaz, under the cover name Salyut3, was successfully launched on Jun. 26, 1974, and its inaugural crew, Pavel Popovich and Yuri Artyukhin, docked with the station on Jul. 3 for a stay lasting a couple of weeks.
The successful Salyut 4 was deorbited on Feb. 3, 1977, bringing the highest civilian honor, Hero of the Socialist Labor, to the chief designer of the spacecraft, Yuri Semenov, and one of the assembly technicians, V. Morozov (despite official objections that Morozov was not a member of the Communist Party)
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