Handmade custom model of Salyut 1 space station with docked Soyuz 11, created by NPO Energia. A beautifully-detailed metal and resin model on a 19. 1/2” x 5.5" wooden base, overall 7.1/2" tall and 21" across. This outstanding one of a kind display model has hundreds of little details.

On April 19, 1971, the Soviet Union placed into orbit Salyut, the world’s first space station. Designed for a 6-month on orbit operational lifetime.

Salyut 1 was successfully put into orbit by a Proton-K rocket.

The station was first visited on 23 April 1971 by Soyuz 10 with a three-man crew consisting of Vladimir Shatalov, Aleksei Yeliseyev and Nikolai Rukavishnikov. The capsule failed to hard-dock due to problems with the Soyuz's autopilot. The mission was aborted and the crew returned safely to Earth.

The second mission, Soyuz 11, was launched on 7 June 1971 and successfully docked with the station. The three cosmonauts, Georgy Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patsayev and Vladislav Volkov, entered the station. During their stay, they checked out the systems of the station, performed observations of the Earth and various experiments. After 23 days, the mission was prematurely ended due to problems of the station. The mission ended tragically, when during their return to Earth, the cosmonauts died as a result of the sudden depressurization of their spacecraft.

With further flights to Salyut cancelled while engineers redesigned the Soyuz spacecraft, controllers commanded the station into a destructive reentry over the Pacific Ocean on Oct. 11, 1971, after 175 days in space.

Over the succeeding decades, Soviet, and later Russian, engineers continually improved on the original Salyut design, launching ever more capable generations of space stations in the Salyut series and the Mir station’s Base Block. The Zvezda Service Module of the International Space Station’s Russian segment traces its heritage back to the world’s first space station of 50 years ago.

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