Vladimir Chelomei
Proton and the military Almaz stations
Timeline - Chelomei in the record
7 entries from the Secret Dawn - Among the Stars archive, 6 of them events in Chelomei's own life.
Vladimir Chelomei is born in what is now Poland; a brilliant mechanician, he will build the design bureau that rivals Korolev's.
Chelomei makes his name in pulsejet cruise missiles and heads OKB-51 from September 1944; his own OKB-52 in Reutov follows in 1955 and by the 1960s is a power in its own right, protected for a time by Khrushchev (whose son he employed).
Chelomei develops the Proton heavy rocket and proposes the Almaz, a crewed military reconnaissance space station with its own return capsule and defensive gun.
To hide their military purpose, Chelomei's Almaz stations fly under the civilian Salyut designation (Salyut 2, 3, 5). Salyut 3 carries an aircraft cannon, the only armed space station ever flown.
The first military Almaz station, flown under the Salyut cover name, breaks up in orbit before a crew can board, the secret armed reconnaissance station programme of Chelomei's bureau.
The first TKS flies unmanned as Kosmos 929 in 1977; Kosmos 1267 docks with Salyut 6 in 1981 and Kosmos 1443 with Salyut 7 in 1983. The crewed Almaz programme is cancelled, but Chelomei's transport spacecraft and its modules become the basis of the add-on modules for Salyut 7, Mir and eventually the ISS.
Chelomei dies in Moscow; his Proton rocket and station modules outlive him by decades, still flying into the 21st century.
The research file for this dossier holds 8 verified source entries, 8 of them distinct works. The sources page lists every one of them with what it covers, how it was reached, and the sharpest point at which this page and its sources come apart.