Salyut 1, the world's first space station, is launched

On 19 April 1971, the Soviet Union launched Salyut 1, the world’s first space station, atop a Proton rocket from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Where earlier spaceflight had carried crews for days at a time, Salyut was built to be a place people could live and work — a single orbiting laboratory that future crews would visit and reuse.

Reaching it proved hard. The first visitors, aboard Soyuz 10, launched on 23 April but could not achieve a hard docking and never entered the station. It fell to the Soyuz 11 crew — Georgi Dobrovolski, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev — to board Salyut on 7 June and become the first people to occupy a space station.

They spent a then record-setting 24 days aboard.

The triumph ended in tragedy: the Soyuz 11 crew died when their capsule depressurised during reentry. Even so, Salyut proved humans could live and work in orbit, and seven Salyut stations flew over the next decade, paving the way for Mir and the International Space Station.