A Troubled Salyut

Though their huge unmanned Salyut (Salute) supercraft continued to circle the earth last week, the Russians failed to achieve their ambitious goal: a manned orbital space station. In fact, there was growing belief among Western space experts that the much-heralded mission of Salyut and Soyuz 10 never really recovered from a shaky start.

Despite initial Russian hints of a complex mission of long duration, U.S. scientists suspected shortly after Salyut was launched that something had gone wrong. The heavy cylindrical craft, intended as the hub of a space station, reached an orbit of only 140 by 130 miles. That meant that it was passing through the outer fringes of the atmosphere, which would slow it down and cause it to burn up in a plunge back toward earth within a few weeks.

Delay in the launch of Soyuz 10 and its three-man crew stirred more suspicions. Russian officials were apparently deciding if it was worthwhile trying to rendezvous and dock with a craft that would not long remain in orbit. When Soyuz was finally launched, it was unintentionally shot into an orbit higher than Salyut's. It took nearly two days for the manned craft to reach and dock with its target--an operation that the cosmonauts later compared to bringing a train into a large railroad station. Then, only 5 1/2 hours later, having made no attempt to board Salyut, the Soyuz crew returned to earth in an unprecedented night landing. The premature return, one rumor had it, was caused by faulty operation of Soyuz's thrusters. In Moscow, the story circulated that Rookie Cosmonaut Nikolai Rukavishnikov had become "space sick," complained about the sensations of weightlessness, and had to be returned quickly to earth.

At midweek, mission controllers at the Kazakhstan cosmodrome succeeded in raising the craft's orbit to 166 miles by 161 miles, apparently by firing Salyut's on-board rockets. Still, Veteran Space Watcher Heinz Kaminski of West Germany's Bochum Observatory calculated that the boost would keep Salyut alive only for another seven weeks at the most --enough time for more docking attempts but too short a life-span for setting up a working space station.

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