A monolithic space station is basically a barrel in space.

It's a single room that allows people to survive in the vacuum,

where there's no air, there's cosmic radiation all over the place, and there's no food or water, or anything.

So it's a bare basics kind of setup, which sticks around in orbit for a while, allows humans to

survive, which is what makes it a station

rather than a normal satellite, though a station is technically a satellite too, because

it orbits the planet, so it's an artificial satellite of Earth, and it's differentiated from

a spacecraft, like a rocket or a shuttle, in that it's placed in orbit and then maybe fires little thrusters from time to time in order to avoid falling Earthside and burning up in the atmosphere or to dodge other in orbit things like satellites or debris. But otherwise it doesn't go anywhere under its own propulsion.

It's put there by a rocket or some other spacecraft and then hangs out its in-orbit real estate.

And a monolithic version of a space station is the equivalent of a shed rather than a house

because it's just a hollow,

pressurized space that has the essentials so a human can hang out up there and not die,

at least until those essentials like air and water run out, but not much more than that.

The first space stations were monolithic, and the very first space station was

launched by the Soviet Union in mid-1971. This Salute One station was a modified version of a monolithic

frame developed by the Soviets for their military space station program, which was called Almas, but which intermingled

with the Saluet civilian program from day one. In essence, they were developing scientific

and other civilian use case space stations while also developing secretive military space stations,

and they shared technology between the two.

Thus, the first successful space station, the Salute I, was based on a military design,

and then subsequent, salute models, in particular Salute 2, 3, and 5 were military in nature,

but made to look like civilian efforts in order to conceal their true purpose, with mixed results, obviously, since the historical

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