Figure 2-2. Conceptual drawing of Siber multimodule space
station and Siber ferry (1962).

The space station concept is very old in Russia. Space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovskii wrote about space stations as early as 1903.1 The first space station event relevant to this discussion occurred in March 1962, when Sergei Korolev’s OKB-1 design bureau (ancestor of RKK Energia–until recently, NPO Energia) produced a report called “Complex for the Assembly of Space Vehicles in Artificial Earth Satellite Orbit (the Soyuz).” The report was largely concerned with assembly in Earth orbit of a vehicle for circumlunar flight, but also described a small station made up of independently launched modules. Three cosmonauts were to reach the station aboard a manned transport spacecraft called Siber (or Sever) (“north”), shown in figure 2-2. They would live in a habitation module and observe Earth from a “sciencepackage” module.
Mir Hardware Heritage. NASA Reference Publication 1357 (March 1995).
David S. F. Portree / NASA