Vladimir Chelomei
Proton and the military Almaz stations
Timeline - Chelomei in the record
7 referenced events from the Secret Dawn - Among the Stars archive.
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; by the 1960s his OKB-52 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 test-fires a cannon in orbit, the only weapon ever fired in space.
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.
Though the crewed Almaz programme is cancelled, Chelomei's TKS 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.