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Comment by david-given | Hacker News Reader

I can't comment on the effect, other than that it looks really weird and I'd really appreciate a plain-English explanation, but Dzhanibekov is also famous for being part of the repair crew that flew to the defunct Salyut 7 space station in 1985.

There's a good writeup here:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2014/09/the-little-known-sov...

...but the tl;dr is: no power, no automated docking system, no life support, no onboard computers, and it was so cold that all the station's water supplies had frozen.

They got it working; Dzhanibekov ended up staying on the station for 110 days...

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Wow. That's one hell of a story!

It's like those hollywood space stories.... Only real.

And then... A station-to-station transfer?!? That must be really hard. I mean, I'm no astronaut, but even in KSP it's a hard operation. Can't even begin to imagine what kind of skills and calculations that required.

Both stations need to be on sinilar altitudes I guess? Otherwise the amount of fuel needed would be prohibitive, no?

Could any one shed sone light on this manouver? I mean, if that's the only obe time this has been done it's probably because it' very hard and I'm guessing it's not something terribly useful. Or is it?

Any write ups on this?

A russian film is just made on this topic. Here a link with trailers on the page:

http://ctb.ru/en/films/salyut-7/

That looks really cool (although the free fall scenes are faked, sadly) --- do you know if it's getting an international release with English subtitles?

no idea, really. Apparently the film should be already out in the Russian cinemas. There is also a documentary from Roskosmos about the operation[1]. The beginning is boring, but then they claim, the Shuttle "Challenge" visited Saljut-7 as a preparation for taking the soviet station to the Earth. Still watching it, no subtitles (my Russian is rather intermediate). There is also a book from Victor Savinikh, the flight engineer called "diaries from a dead station"[2], but couldn't find any comments on that book.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxhv6GOLZqE [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20633100

I'm amazed it's not better known. (Of course, the USA had to send an emergency repair crew to their own Skylab station when a bit fell off during launch...)

Re station-to-station transfers: Mir and Salyut 7 both had the same orbital inclinations (probably deliberately) of 51.5°; Mir's apoapsis was about 360km, Salyut 7's was about 250km. So a transfer would be relatively cheap. The vehicle was a Soyuz T only had about 320m/s of delta-V, which was also needed for rendezvous and deorbit, so it would have to be.

I think this was the only station-to-station transfer ever done. It was probably only feasible because they were in the same orbital plane.

(Although I'm a little surprised they didn't build Mir using Salyut-7 as a core module. Even if they ditched the module later as it wore out, it'd provide power, attitude control and automated docking.)

Thanks for the extra info!

According to the article this was indeed the only station-to-station transfer, and although very cool I am not sure exactly why would you do it except for some emergency or for building up a new station out of parts from others like you suggested.

Do you have any idea what use would there be for a s-to-s transfer? I'm guessing it's more expensive and dangerous than launching a specific mission from Earth, so the use would be limited. Maybe to test some emergency procedure a-la Gravity (the movie)?

It would be really cool if there was some other big space station so that this would be something to think about... but oh well, I guess having the ISS will have to suffice for now.... It's not like I have the money to build my own unfortunately :(

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