On this day in space! April 3, 1973: Soviet Union launches Salyut 2 space station

On April 3, 1973, the Soviet Union launched a small space station called Salyut 2. This was the second space station to be successfully launched (after Salyut 1) and the first military space station.

The Soviet Union told the rest of the world that Salyut 2 was a civilian space station built for scientific research, but it was secretly intended to be a crewed military reconnaissance station. No crews ever made it to Salyut 2, though.

The former Soviet Union's second Salyut space station, Salyut-2, is seen with its launch shroud attached inside its assembly building at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. (Image credit: RKK Energia)

Less than two weeks after it launched, its attitude control system stopped working, and it started tumbling around in space. Mission control noticed that pressure inside the station had dropped for no apparent reason.

They later found out that a small explosion had happened in the station's propulsion system several days earlier. The damaged station was slowly falling apart. Bits and pieces of Salyut 2 fell back to Earth and burned up in the atmosphere.

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Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos. 

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