Securing the reliability of orbital stations

The paper gives a general discussion of the problem of securing the conditions necessary for a crew on a long-term space mission to carry out their functions and tasks. Elements of the solution to this problem involve availability to the crew of equipment for carrying out routine checkups on the state of onboard systems, monitoring the values of their technical characteristics, and replacing parts after normal exhaustion or failure. Since a compromise has to be reached between total redundancy of systems and complexity and weight of the station, the repairability of large parts of the system is an important factor. Some remarks on the training of the Salyut crews in repair work are made.