On 19 April 1971, a roughly 19-ton aluminum cylinder called Salyut 1 lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome and settled into low Earth orbit, becoming the first space station in history. The Soviet Union would launch eight more Salyuts over the next decade, in a program that ran from 1971 to 1991 and hosted more than 100 cosmonauts from the Soviet Union and allied countries.
Salyut 1 was based on the Almaz military station design. It was 20 m long with a 4.15 m maximum diameter and 100 m³ of habitable volume. The Soyuz 11 crew (Dobrovolsky, Volkov, Patsayev) lived aboard for 23 days in June 1971, setting an endurance record, but died during reentry when a pressure-equalization valve opened prematurely. The loss led to a major Soyuz redesign.
Salyut 6 (1977) introduced a second docking port for Progress cargo resupply. The longest single mission on Salyut 6 was 140 days (Kovalyonok and Ivanchenkov, 1978). Salyut 7 (1982) supported a 237-day mission in 1984; in 1985, a crew was sent to repair the station after a total electrical failure, an event dramatized in the 2017 film Salyut 7.
The Salyut stations outlasted Skylab’s longest mission (84 days) and established the operational pattern of routine crew rotation and cargo resupply that the ISS continues. The experience was directly applied to the design of Mir.
For the rest of Soviet space program article and the space race overview.