Category Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration

The basic Soyuz was 7.13 m long, 2.72m wide, with a habitable volume of 10.5m3, a launch weight of up to 6,800 kg, and a descent capsule weight of 2,800 kg. Soyuz consisted of three modules: equipment, descent and orbital. The equipment module contained retrorockets and manoeuvring engines, fuel, solar wings and supplies. The acorn-shaped descent module was the home of cosmonauts during ascent and descent, which one entered through the top. There were portholes, a parachute section and three contour seats. The orbital module, attached on the front, was almost circular, with a spacewalk hatch, lockers for food, equipment and experiments. Being more spacious, the cosmonauts lived there rather than the cramped descent module. From Soyuz there protruded a periscope for dockings, two seagull-like solar panels, aerials, docking probe on the front and flashing lights and beacons. On top of the Soyuz was an escape tower. Normally jettisoned at 2 min 40 sec into the flight, the purpose of the escape tower was to fire the Soyuz free of a rogue rocket. A solid rocket motor, with twelve angled nozzles of 80,000 kg thrust, would fire for 5 sec.

The initial tests of Soyuz were not auspicious. The first test of Soyuz was Cosmos 133 on 28th November 1966. Cosmos 133 was to have docked with a second Soyuz, launched a day later, but this launch was cancelled when Cosmos 133 developed attitude control problems. The Cosmos could not be positioned properly for reentry and was destroyed deliberately for fear that it would land in China. During the second test, a month later, the rocket failed to take off. When the gantries were swung back around the rocket, the cabin was accidentally tipped, causing the escape tower to fire, thus setting the upper stage on fire and causing an explosion which destroyed the pad. One person died, but it could have been many more. The third test, Cosmos 140 on 7th February 1967, followed the test profile up to reentry when a maintenance plug in the heatshield burned through and caused structural damage. Worse followed: the cabin came down in the Aral Sea, crashed through ice and sank (divers later retrieved the cabin from 10 m down).

Despite these difficulties, Russia pressed ahead with a first manned flight of the Soyuz for April 1967. Instead of a cautious, single mission, a big shot was planned. Soyuz would go first, with a single cosmonaut on board, Vladimir Komarov. Twenty – four hours into the flight, Soyuz 2 would follow, commanded by veteran, Valeri Bykovsky. Two newcomers, Yevgeni Khrunov and Alexei Yeliseyev would fly with him. The rendezvous would simulate the moon link-up. Soyuz would be the active craft and would rendezvous on orbit 1. Then the show would really begin. Khrunov and Yeliseyev would don suits, leave Soyuz 2 and transfer into Soyuz to join Komarov. The spacewalk would simulate the transfer of cosmonauts between the the lunar orbiter and lunar lander as they circled the moon. The two ships would then separate after about four hours. Komarov, now accompanied by Khrunov and Yeliseyev, would be back on the ground by the end of day 2, Bykovsky following on day 3. So, in 72 breathtaking hours, the new Soyuz craft would demonstrate Earth orbit rendezvous on the first orbit, transfer by spacewalking to a primitive space station, carry out key tests for the moon flight and put the USSR back in front.

As the launch date drew near, there were a record 203 faults in Soyuz which required correction. The pre-test flights had been disconcerting. An atmosphere of foreboding prevailed at the cosmodrome. As Vladimir Komarov climbed into the transfer van to take the ride down to the pad, he had an air of fatalistic resignation about him. His fellow cosmonauts joshed him, trying to cheer him and get a smile. They started singing, encouraging him to join in. By the time they reached the pad some minutes later, he was singing with them too and the mood of pessimism had lifted somewhat. At 3: 35 a. m. Moscow time (not quite sunrise local time) on 23rd April 1967, the R-7 rocket lit the sky up and headed off in the direction of the growing embers of the onrushing dawn. Eight minutes later Vladimir Komarov was back in orbit testing out the most sophisticated spacecraft ever launched.

The trouble started at once when one of Soyuz’s two solar panels failed to deploy, starving the craft of electrical power. Other glitches developed as the day went on. The first attempt to change the craft’s orbit was unsatisfactory. The ship began to rotate around its axis and only spun more when Komarov tried to correct the problem. The thermal control system degenerated, communications with the ground became irregular and lack of electricity prevented the astro-orientation system from operat­ing. The ion system had to be used instead. Ground control was considering a way of launching Soyuz 2 and for the spacewalking cosmonauts to free the errant solar panel of Soyuz when a tremendous storm hit the launch site and knocked out the electrical systems of the waiting rocket. The decision was taken to abandon the Soyuz 2 launch and bring Komarov home at the first available opportunity, on orbit 16 the next morning.

Even then, there was more trouble. Just as the attitude control system was lining up the Soyuz for reentry, the craft passed into darkness and it lost orientation. The decision was made to try again on orbit 17, even though it too would bring Soyuz far away from the normal landing site. Using procedures that he had never practised in training, Komarov managed to align the craft and fire the retrorockets himself. Despite his heroic efforts to save the mission, worse was to come. As the cabin descended through the atmosphere, the drogue parachute came out but the main parachute remained stubbornly in its container. When the reserve chute was popped out, it tangled in the lines of the drag chute of the main parachute. Soyuz 1 crashed at great speed into the steppe at Orenberg at 7 a. m. The cabin exploded on impact and when Air Force recovery teams arrived all they found was burning metal, the rim of the top of Soyuz being the only hardware they could identify. They piled on soil to extinguish the flames.

The control centre knew nothing of what had happened. As they closed in on the wreckage, the recovery team sent a garbled message to the effect that the cosmonaut needed ‘urgent medical attention’ (a euphemism for the worst possible news), but the local Air Force commander closed off all communications. Defence Minister Ustinov was informed of the true outcome at 11 a. m. and Leonid Brezhnev an hour later in Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia. The Soviet people were officially informed later in the day. Gagarin himself removed Komarov’s body from the wreckage. Some days later, some young Pioneers (boy scouts) found some further remains of Vladimir Komarov on the steppe. They buried them and made a small memorial for him of their own.

Vladimir Komarov’s loyal comrades laid his remains to rest in the Kremlin Wall two days later. It was a sombre and chilling occasion, an unwelcome reminder of the real costs of the moon race. As the bands played the haunting Chopin funeral march the grim-faced and tight-lipped cosmonaut corps, now diminished to nine men and one woman, swore that the programme must go on relentlessly.

The consensus afterwards was that the whole mission had been rushed before Soyuz was really ready. It was apparent that Komarov had behaved masterfully in steering Soyuz successfully through reentry against all the odds. The failure in the parachute system was quite unrelated to the many problems that had arisen in the flight up to that time. The system for sealing the parachute container was defective, making the parachute likely to stick as it came out. This left the investigators with the chilling conclusion that if Soyuz 2 had been successfully launched, it too would have

crashed on its return. Years later, Valeri Bykovsky recalled how the storm had saved his life.

Early tests of Soyuz

28 Nov 1966 Cosmos 133 (failure)

Dec. 1966 Pad explosion

7 Feb 1967 Cosmos 140 (failure)

23 Apr 1967 Soyuz (failure)

Just over a week later, Zond 6 headed away from Earth onto a moon trajectory (10th November). Several cosmonauts attended the launch, some hoping that one day soon they would fly a future Zond. The problems from the earlier missions then reasserted themselves. The Earth sensor failed and then the high-gain antenna failed to deploy. Despite this, two days later Zond 6 adjusted its path and on 14th November rounded the moon at a close point of 2,418 km with its automatic camera clicking away and taking metres and metres of photographs of the moon’s surface. Zond 6 carried a similar payload to Zond 5: 400 mm camera, cosmic ray sensor, micrometeorite detector and some unidentified animals (probably turtles again).

Even as the mission was in progress, the Russians were well aware of the start of the countdown for Apollo 8 at Cape Canaveral. The head of the cosmonaut corps, General Kamanin, considered the Apollo 8 mission to be pure adventurism and an extraordinary risk. He then considered a Russian manned flight around the moon to be a possibility for the first half of 1969. But, he conceded, the Americans might just pull off their mission first. There were hurried phone calls from the Kremlin: Can we still beat Apollo 8? No, said Kamanin. The best we could do is a manned flight in January, assuming Zond 6 is a success and Apollo is delayed. The most realistic date for a manned circumlunar mission was April 1969. The leaders of the space programme would not be rushed. The Soviet approach – four successful Zonds first – was clearly more conservative in respect of safety.

Zond 6 was now returning to Earth, though more problems emerged. Cabin pressure in the descent module suddenly fell, but then held. Temperatures in the fuel tanks fluctuated up and down. Zond 6 did manage to fire its engine briefly on 15th November, 251,900 km out, to adjust its course home and again a mere 10 hours before reentry to refine its trajectory. Zond 6 reentered over the Indian Ocean and dived to 45 km altitude. Pointing its heat shield at 90° to the flight path generated a cushion of lift underneath the Zond, bouncing it back into space. It was skipping across the atmosphere like a stone skipping across water, its speed now down from 11 km/sec to 7.6 km/sec. Zond 6 soared back into space in an arc and several minutes later began its second reentry. At this stage, things began to go awry. First, the high – gain antenna failed to separate. Second, more seriously, a gasket blew, depressurizing the cabin while it was still in space – which would have been fatal if unsuited cos­monauts had been on board and certainly did kill the animals on board at this stage. Third, between 3 km and 5 km above the ground, a spurious electrical signal com­manded the firing of the landing retrorocket and the ejection of the parachute. Zond 6 crashed to the ground from a great height unaided. Unlike the first Soyuz, it did not explode on impact, but any spacesuited cosmonauts on board would have died. It took ground crews a day to find the cabin. They salvaged the film, which was then exhibited to the world as proof of a completely successful mission. Only decades later was film of the badly battered moon cabin released and the truth of Zond 6 told.

Zond 6 was a triumph for the skip reentry trajectory first plotted ten years earlier by Department # 9. However, the performance of Zond 6 to and from the moon still needed some improvement. The landing accident was so serious that more work was still required on the landing systems, which had been considered solved by the smooth return of Soyuz 3. Sadly, the Russians did not learn their lesson as a result of the depressurization high above the atmosphere and put cosmonauts into spacesuits for such critical manoeuvres. The crew of Soyuz 11 later paid the penalty for this failure to learn. As for the planned flight around the moon by cosmonauts, it was postponed.

The first of the new batch of Ye-8-5 spacecraft was not available until the following month. Luna 16 was launched on 12th September 1970, and it headed out moonwards on a slow four-day coast. In contrast to the great media interest which Luna 15 had attracted, Luna 16 went virtually unremarked by the Western media. This was a pity,

for Luna 16 was a remarkable technical achievement by any standard. Its flight coincided with what became known to the world as Black September. Four airliners were seized in the space of a few hours by Palestinian fighters; the aircraft were hijacked to a remote airstrip called Dawson’s Field in Jordan; King Hussein’s army moved in to crush the Palestinians. The world looked on, mesmerized.

Luna 16 carried, like Luna 15 before it, the new KTDU-417 main engine built by the Isayev design bureau. The KTDU-417 had a throttleable engine ranging from

750 kg to 1,920 kg. At highest thrust, it had a specific impulse of 310 sec, able to burn for 10 min 50 sec using up to four tonnes of propellant. This engine was built to perform mid-course correction, lunar orbit insertion, pre-descent burn, the ‘dead – stop’ burn to take it out of lunar orbit and the final burn 600 m above the moon. There was also scope for further manoeuvres in lunar orbit, as had proved necessary on Luna 15 and the engine could be fired up to eleven times. It could also be used at lowest thrust with a specific impulse of 250 sec [1]. The engines for the final stages of landing had a thrust of 210 and 350 kg.

Luna 16 burned its engine on the first day for 6.4 sec to make a course correction. Luna 16 entered moon orbit on 17th September at an altitude of 110 km to 119 km, 71°, 1 hr 59min. The aim was to achieve a circular lunar orbit around 100km.

After two days, Luna 16 fired its engine to make a 20-m/sec velocity change and brake into an elliptical course of 106 km by 15.1 km, with the perilune over the landing site. Its final path before descent was 15 km by 9 km, so low as to only barely scrape the peaks of the moon’s highest mountains. At this stage, the four 75 kg large propellant tanks that had been used for mid-course correction, lunar orbit injection and orbital change were jettisoned.

As Luna 16 skimmed over the eastern highlands of the moon on the 20th, the retrorocket of the 1,880 kg craft blasted and Luna 16 began to fall. First, the main engines blasted for 267 sec, using about 75% of fuel remaining, to kill all forward motion. This was a big burn, 1,700 m/sec. The critical stage had begun. Luna 16 was now over flat lowlands. Sophisticated radar and electronic gear scanned the surface, measuring the distance and the rate of descent. After the ‘dead stop’ engine burn, Luna 16 was in free fall, coming down at 215 m/sec, until six minutes later it was at 600 m. Then the main engine blasted again. At 20 m, a point detected by Doppler – sounding gamma rays, the retrorocket cut off and small vernier engines came into play. At 2 m, sensing the nearness of the surface, these too cut out, the intention being to achieve a landing speed of 2.5 m/sec or 9km/hr. Luna 16 dropped silently to the airless surface, bouncing gently on its four landing pads. It was down, safe and sound, on the Sea of Fertility, 100 km from crater Webb. The flat and stony ground was marked only by a few small craters, even if they were not visible during the descent, because Luna 16 had landed in darkness. This and subsequent soil-sampling missions carried stereo cameras of the type carried by Luna 13, so the quality of images should have been very good. The purpose of the cameras was to help to guide the operators of the drill and for such night landings floodlights were carried.

Strong signals were picked up by Western tracking stations. Within hours, the USSR had announced its third soft-landing on the moon – but said no more. The Russians had still not admitted that the intention of the probe was to collect samples.

Meantime, a quarter of a million miles away a 90 cm drill arm swung out from Luna 16 like a dentist’s drill on a support. It swung well clear of the base of the spacecraft, free from any area that might have been contaminated by gases of landing engines. The wrist of the drill had a flexibility of 110° elevation, 180° rotation and was able to drill to 35 cm. The drill head bored into the lunar surface at 500 r. p.m. using electric motors for 7 min and then scooped the grains of soil down to 35 cm deep. There it began to hit rock and, rather than risk damaging the drill, the boring was

terminated and the sample collected and put into the container attached to the drill head. Like a robot in a backyard assembly shop, the drill head jerked upwards, brought itself alongside the small 39 kg spherical recovery capsule, turned it round and pressed the grains into the sealed cabin, which was then slapped shut.

How do Soviet space leaders regard their exploration of the moon now? In the early 1990s, the leaders of the space programme at the time emerged from the shadows to tell their story of the moon programme. Inevitably, granted the secrecy of the period, their first concern was to tell what happened. Many were directly involved as partisan protagonists, so their comments must be treated cautiously.

One of the first to tell the story was Chief Designer Vasili Mishin, first in magazine articles and then in interviews (his diaries were bought by the Ross Perot Foundation and have yet to be published). He was followed by numerous journalists, writing in dailies such as Izvestia and magazines like Znaniya. Some of the most detailed infor­mation was provided by the head of the cosmonaut squad, General Nikolai Kamanin, who kept a diary throughout the period and which has now been translated [6]. Latest and possibly last of the old guard to speak out was Boris Chertok, who in his eighties compiled a multi-volume memoir, published as Raketi i Lyudi (Rockets and people). Regrettably, little has been put in print by the cosmonauts involved in the lunar programme and some of them have already died. Oleg Makarov, for example, although he would have been on the first around-the-moon and first landing mission, was prepared to talk about the planned Zond mission, but would say very little about his own prominent role [7].

All expressed varying levels of regret, even grief, that the Soviet Union failed to win the moon race. Having achieved all the early breakthroughs in space exploration, they took the view that the Soviet Union should, with proper organization, have been able to reach the moon first. ‘How could we, after such a bright start, have slipped into second place?’ asked military journalist and cosmonaut candidate Col. Mikhail Rebrov [8]. Kamanin told his diary just how difficult it was for him to come to terms with what he regarded, unambiguously and without any mitigating factors, as a crushing defeat: ‘We drain the bitter cup of failure to the dregs,’ he acidly told his diary. He can’t have been the only one.

Most agreed with the reasons advanced by Mishin to explain why the Soviet Union lost: resources much inferior to the United States, the rivalry of the design bureaux, the continual revision and remaking of decisions, the false economy of avoid­ing comprehensive ground-testing, the death of Korolev at a crucial stage [9]. Most were sympathetic to Mishin, regarding his dismissal and the suspension of the N-1 programme as bad and even unjust decisions. In histories in which blame is liberally apportioned and widely scattered, several focused on Glushko for not being big enough to cooperate with the N-1 project from the start, arguing that he played an inconsistent, spoiling and even vindictive role in the programme [10]. Most felt that the N-1 would probably flown and been a successful rocket, eventually assembling large orbital stations. Chertok believed the Soviet Union did have the capacity to build a proper lunar base in the late 1970s and that such a venture made political, engineering and scientific sense, although it would have been costly [11]. Mishin [12]: We were able and should have implemented such an expedition after the USA. ‘Only a sense of political embarrassment, out of coming second, after the great rival, pre­vented this from happening,’ he said. Most of all he regrets the cancellation of the N-1, the wasted effort, the bitter resentment this caused in the industry and its replacement by an even more expensive programme which was ultimately cancelled in turn. Mishin’s final comment: ‘We were just a step away from success with the N-1. We could have built a base on the moon by now without stress or hurry.’

Having said this, these accounts are somewhat one-sided. Vladimir Chelomei did not leave memoirs, nor did Valentin Glushko. Although Glushko published technical papers, he never left behind a political statement defending his role in the space programme. When he died in 1989, his vast Energiya bureau was re-divided much as it was before he clustered its constituent companies together in 1974. The original OKB-1, now RKK Energiya, published a vast, colourful company history of the bureau and its projects, providing much of the detail on which an important portion of our knowledge of the Soviet moon programme is based. More critical comments and views come from General Kamanin. A diehard Stalinist, his severest criticisms focused on what he regarded as the poor quality of leadership given by the party and government, his own military and the space programme leadership, like Mishin and Keldysh. He was critical of the N-1 from the start, which he always regarded as an unsuitable and bad rocket: Chelomei’s UR-700 would have been better. Patriot though he was, he was overwhelmed in unconditional admiration of America’s stunning lunar successes. He resented the way in which they were under-reported and downplayed by the Soviet media and that he could not speak publicly and approvingly of them. He felt just how tough it must be on disappointed Soviet cosmonauts not to fly to the moon. Kamanin was especially critical on how good decision-making was undermined by the corrosive secrecy with which the Soviet lunar programme was run.

Retelling the Soviet side of the moon race, with its setbacks, ‘grandiose failures’ (Kamanin’s words), waste and poor decisions, seems to have given these writers little satisfaction, apart from the unmeasurably important one of making the facts of this hidden history known. They seemed to derive little comfort from the fact that from the chaotic final stages of the moon programme, a plan emerged for the building of space stations. This was a field in which their country became the undisputed world leader and remains so to this day. In his own way, Glushko was vindicated, for in 1987 his replacement for the N-1 did fly, Energiya giving the Soviet Union the most powerful rocket system in the world. Its subsequent cancellation, for economic reasons, can hardly be laid at his door. Unlike the N-1 and more like the Saturn V, the Energiya flew perfectly on its first two testflights and it was not for technical reasons that it never flew again.

Some of the writers refer to the general loss of interest in going to the moon among the Soviet political leadership, now that the Americans had achieved the feat and demonstrated it several times. Afanasayev [13] said that this was the considered view of the Soviet political leadership by 1972 and suggests that the decision to wind down the unmanned lunar programme was taken at around the same time as the decision regarding the manned programme. It is interesting that the political leadership of both the United States and the Soviet Union lost interest in flying to the moon in parallel at around the same time, even though one country had been there and the other had not. The next grand projet of Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was a more practical, earthly one, the Baikal Amur Railway.

The hardware and rockets from the Soviet lunar programme mostly found their way to museums, like the LK lander. The main collection of unmanned Soviet lunar spacecraft may still be found in the Lavochkin Museum, and that is where Lunokhod 3 may be found. When the financial situation of the Russian space programme reached rock bottom, many of its most famous artefacts were sold, from spacesuits to space cabins, Vasili Mishin’s diary, even Sergei Korolev’s slide rule. Even real spacecraft were sold. On 11th December 1993, Sotheby’s sold Lunokhod for $68,500, but it was explained to the buyer that he would have to collect it from the Sea of Rains!

It is with the moon drivers that we leave the story. Lunokhod was one of the great achievements of the lunar exploration programme, though, as we saw, far from the only one. The moon drivers did everything expected of them and more. Not only had they worked away from home for the year-long journey of Lunokhod and the half­year journey of Lunokhod 2, but they were not even allowed to tell their families or friends where they were or what they were doing. Not until perestroika were they allowed to come out of the shadows and tell their remarkable story. Since then, the Lunokhod drivers would gather once a year, on the great 17th November, to recall their experiences in driving on another world. They are older and greyer now and most have now retired. Vyacheslav Dovgan is now a general. Happily, they were at last formally conferred with the medals that they had deserved a quarter century earlier and now wear them with pride [14].

Preparations for the flight of Soyuz coincided with those of the Soyuz-derived L-1 cabin, which would fly a cosmonaut around the moon. The L-1 cabin was later called Zond, thus creating confusion with the engineering tests developed by Korolev as part of the interplanetary programme. Zond 1 had flown to Venus, Zond 2 to Mars, Zond 3 to the moon to test equipment for Mars and now Zond 4-8 would fill an important part in preparations to send cosmonauts around the moon.

From August 1964, the Soviet lunar programme had been divided between the around-the-moon programme (Proton, L-1/Zond) and the manned lunar landing (N-1, LOK, LK). When the State Commission on the L-1 met in December 1966, it set a date for the first manned circumlunar flight of 26th June 1967, to be preceded by four unmanned tests.

Zond was a stripped-down version of Soyuz. Its weight was 5,400 kg, length 5 m, span across its two 2 m by 3 m solar arrays 9 m, diameter 2.72 m and a habitable volume of 3.5 m3. It could take a crew of either one or two cosmonauts in its descent module. The sole engine was the 417 kg thrust Soyuz KDU-35 able to burn for about 270 sec, but it fired more thrusters than Soyuz. Its heatshield was thicker than Soyuz in order to withstand the high friction on lunar reentry at 11 km/sec. It carried an umbrella-like, long-distance, high-gain antenna and on the top a support cone, to which the escape tower was attached. Designer was Yuri Semeonov. The following were the main differences between Soyuz and L-1 Zond. Zond was:

• Smaller, without an orbital module.

• Maximum crew of two, not three.

• Instrument panel configured for lunar missions.

• Support cone at top.

• Long-distance dish aerial for communications.

• Thicker, heavier heatshield for high-speed reentry.

• Removal of docking periscope.

• Smaller solar panels.

Theoretically, Zond could take three cosmonauts; but, without an orbital module it would be tight enough for two for the 6-day mission. The mission profile was for Proton to launch Zond into a parking orbit. On the first northbound equator pass, block D would ignite and send Zond to the moon. Zond would take three days to reach the moon, swing around the farside in a figure-of-eight trajectory and take three days to come home. The spacecraft would have to hit a very narrow reentry corridor. It would use Tikhonravov’s skip technique to bounce out of the atmosphere, killing the speed and then descend to recovery. The designers decreed that there should be four successful missions out to the moon, or a simulated moon, before putting cosmonauts on board for the mission.

An important distinction between Apollo on the one hand and the Soyuz, L-1/ Zond and LOK on the other was the high level of automation on Soviet spacecraft. As noted above, the Soviet Union decided to pave the way for a manned flight around the moon with no fewer than four automatic flights that precisely flew the same profile as the intended manned spacecraft. A comparable regime would have been followed for the LOK and a series of wholly automatic tests were set for the lunar lander, the LK and the block D upper stage. The Soyuz system was designed to achieve entirely automated rendezvous and docking in Earth orbit. All this required a high level of sophistication in control and computerized systems, something the Russians were rarely given the credit for. From the start, Korolev had built a high degree of automation into spacecraft, a decision which seems to have gone unchallenged

and the early manned spaceship designs were finalized long before the first cos­monauts arrived. The head of cosmonaut training, General Kamanin, is known to have been privately critical of the high level of automation and the lack of scope given to cosmonauts to fly their own spacecraft. Zond carried the first computers used on Soviet spacecraft, the Argon series. Argon weighed 34 kg, light for its day and was the primary navigation system. It was assessed as having a reliability rate of 99.9% [12]. The Argon 11S was completed in 1968 in time for the Zond lunar missions. The cosmonauts would control the L-1 with a command system called Alfa, which had a 64-word read-write menu and 64 commands, with a choice of 4,096 words [13].

Although Zond was based on Soyuz, it had an entirely different control panel. As happened from time to time in the Soviet space programme, this came to light by accident. During the late 1970s, at a time when the Russians claimed ‘there had never been a moon race’, they released pictures of cosmonauts Vladimir Shatalaov and Valeri Kubasov in training, set against a background of what was presumed to be a Soyuz control panel. It must have escaped the censors that the control panel was entirely different from the Soyuz, with the Earth orbit orientation system taken out. The Zond control cabin comprised a series of caution and warning panels; cabin pressure, composition and electric meters; computer command systems; periscope; and translunar navigation systems.

The Soviet around-the-moon mission operated under a number of constraints, as follows:

• The moon should be high in the sky over the northern hemisphere during the outward and returning journey, so as to facilitate communications between Zond and the tracking stations, which were located on the Russian landmass.

• There should be a new moon, as viewed from Earth, with the farside illuminated by the sun. Zond should arrive at the moon when it was between 24 and 28 days old.

• The parking orbit must be aligned with the plane of the moon’s orbit.

• Reentry posed a real dilemma. Zond could reenter over the northern hemisphere, in full view of the tracking stations, but the long reentry corridor would bring the spaceship down over the Indian Ocean, where it would have to splash down. The cosmonauts would therefore be out of contact with the ground during this final phase, waiting for recovery ships to find them and pick them up.

• Alternatively, Zond could reenter over the Indian Ocean in the southern hemi­sphere, out of radio contact, but come down in the standard landing zone for Soviet cosmonauts in Kazakhstan. This offered a traditional landing on dry land, the prospect of being spotted during the descent and a quick recovery. Generally, this was the favoured approach and the one that would probably have been followed on a manned mission.

Opinions in the space programme were divided about the wisdom of splashdowns. Chief Designer Mishin was in favour, believing they presented no particular danger. Many others were against, arguing that the descent module was not very seaworthy,

was difficult to escape in the ocean and could take some time to find. They also argued against the expense involved in having a big recovery fleet at sea.

The timing for Russian around-the-moon missions around the sun-Earth-moon symmetries was therefore quite complex [14]. To meet all these requirements, there are only about six launching windows, each about three days long and a month apart, each year. There can be long periods when there are no optimum conditions. There were no optimum launch windows for Zond to the moon between January and July 1969, the climax of the moon race. The scarcity of these opportunities explains why several L-1s (e. g., Zond 4) were fired away from the moon. Although these missions caused mystery in the West, the primary Russian interest was in testing navigation, tracking and the reentry corridor. Having the moon in the sky was not absolutely necessary for these things and since it was not available anyway, they flew these missions without going around the moon.

Source: Portree (1995); RKK Energiya (2001)

When the L-1 Zond was wheeled out for its first test – Cosmos 146, set for 10th March 1967 – the three-stage UR-500K Proton stood over 44 m tall and must have been a striking sight. The first two tests were called the L-1P, P for ‘preliminary’ indicating that a full version of Zond would not be used and that a recovery would not be attempted. The first stage would burn for 2 min with 894 tonnes of thrust. The second stage would burn for 215 sec. The third stage would place Zond or the L-1 in low – Earth orbit in a 250 sec burn. Finally, the Korolev block D fourth stage would fire 100 sec to achieve full orbit. One day after liftoff, the fourth stage, block D, would relight on the first northbound pass over the equator to send Zond out to a simulated moon [15].

Cosmos 146 was the fifth flight of Proton and the first with a block D. The block D’s single 58M engine had 8.7 tonnes of thrust and burned for 600 sec, enough to accelerate the payload to 11km/sec. In the event, block D successfully accelerated the cabin to near-escape velocity, with Cosmos 146 ending up in an elliptical high orbit reaching far out from Earth (though its ultimate path was not precisely determined). Signals and communications tests were carried out. This was an en­couraging start to the L-1 programme, setting it on course for the first lunar circumnavigation by the target date of June 1967. Then the landing missions could get under way [16].

Cosmos 154 on 6th April 1967 was designed to repeat the mission to a simulated moon. This time the BOZ ignition assurance device failed during the ascent to orbit and was not in a position to control the block D stage for the simulated translunar burn, which could not now take place. This was a setback, now made worse by the crash of the related Soyuz spacecraft 20 days later and which raised questions about Zond’s control and descent systems. Zond’s parachute system was retested. When two such tests took place in Feodosiya in the Crimea, in June, the parachute lines snarled. Modifications took all summer. The programme underwent a thorough safety review in early September, being reviewed by an expert commission with nine working groups. Although Russia would have loved to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the revolution with a flight around the moon that November, the chances of doing so safely slipped further and further into the distance.

Working overtime, the designers and launch teams got the third L-1 Zond out to the pad by mid-September 1967. The countdown began for a launch on 28th Sep­tember. The aim was to fly the L-1 Zond out to the moon and return for recovery at cosmic velocity, 11 km/sec, coming down 250 km north of Dzhezhkazgan on 4th October (or failing that in the Indian Ocean). The huge red-and-white Proton booster, weighing a record 1,028,500 kg, Zond cabin atop, tipped by a pencil spear of an escape tower, was taking with it Russia’s moon hopes. It sat squat on its giant pad, shrouded by its gantry, as engineers fussed with one technical problem after another. Yet it all went wrong. One of the six engines in the first stage of Proton failed to operate when a rubber plug was dislodged into the fuel line. At 60 sec the rocket veered off course and impacted 65 km downrange, but the Zond cabin was dragged free by the escape system. The cabin was found intact the next morning, though recovering it was difficult, for the toxic burning remains of Proton were all round about.

For the anniversary of the Revolution, the Russians were left with carrying out the mission that had been intended for Soyuz that April, but now without cosmonauts on board. What happened was important for the lunar programme, but not the kind of event that would bring throngs of excited crowds out onto the streets. Cosmos 186 was first to appear, beginning a series of flights that would requalify Soyuz for manned flight once more. It went up on 27th October and was followed three days later by Cosmos 188. Using totally automatic radar, direction-finding and sounding devices, Cosmos 186 at once closed in on 188 in the manoeuvre Komarov was to have carried out in April. The rendezvous and docking manoeuvres that followed went remarkably smoothly, although the double mission was plagued with other difficulties later. At orbital insertion, 188 was only 24 km away from its companion. Cosmos 186 closed rapidly, within two-thirds of an orbit. One hour later, over the South Pacific, they clunked together to form an automatic orbiting complex and 3.5 hours later they separated. Cosmos 186 was recovered the next day and 188 was deorbited on the 2nd November (it was blown up when it came down off course). Although not visually impressive to a spectacular-weary public, it was a display of advanced robotics. It proved the feasibility of first-orbit rendezvous, the viability of Soyuz-style docking and took some of the fears out of lunar orbit rendezvous when all this would have to be done a third of a million kilometres away.

However, the elation surrounding the Cosmos 186-188 mission was followed by a disheartening experience three weeks later. The next attempt to launch Zond, the fourth, was made very early on 23rd November and was aimed at a lunar flyby and recovery. The first stage behaved perfectly, but four seconds into the second-stage burn, one of the four engines failed to reach proper thrust. The automatic control system closed down the other three engines and the emergency system was activated. The landing rockets fired prematurely during the descent and the parachute failed to detach after landing, but the scratched and battered cabin was recovered. Proton itself crashed 300 km from where it took off.

The next L-1 Zond, the fifth, got away successfully on 2nd March, 1968. This time the UR-500K Proton main stages and block D worked perfectly. Zond 4 was fired 354,000km out to the distance of the moon, but in exactly the opposite direction to the moon, where its orbit would be minimally distorted by the moon’s gravitational field. The primary purpose of the mission was to test the reentry at cosmic velocity, so going round the moon itself was not essential. Cosmonauts Vitally Sevastianov and Pavel Popovich used a relay on Zond 4 to speak to ground control in Yevpatoria, Crimea.

The Zond 4 mission was not trouble-free and the first problems developed out­bound. The planned mid-course correction was aborted twice because the astro – navigation system lost its lock on the reference star. When the correction did take place, it was extremely accurate and no more corrections were required. Zond 4 was supposed to dive into the atmosphere to 45 km, before skipping out to 145 km before making its main reentry. The tracking ship off West Africa, the Ristna, picked up signals from Zond indicating that the skip manoeuvre had failed and that it would make a steep ballistic descent, bringing it down over the Gulf of Guinea. On the insistence of the defence minister, Dmitri Ustinov, who was afraid that it might fall into foreign hands, the spacecraft was pre-programmed to explode if it made such a descent. Accordingly, Zond 4 was blown apart 10 km over the Gulf of Guinea. Not everyone was in agreement with this extreme approach to national security. It transpired that Zond 4 was actually 2 km from dead of centre in its reentry corridor (the tolerance was 10 km), but that a sensor had failed, preventing the skip reentry.

Some consolation could be drawn from a repeat of the Cosmos link-up of the previous winter. On 15th April 1968, Cosmos 212 (the active ship) linked to Cosmos 213, this time in a record 47min. Television showed the last 400m of the docking manoeuvre as they aligned their wing-like panels one with another. Millions saw the separation 3 hr 50 min later over the blue void of the Pacific.

By the end of April 1968, the problems experienced by Zond 4 had been cured and the time was ready to try the first circumlunar flight to a ‘real’ moon this time. Launch took place on 23rd April. Unfortunately, 195 sec into the mission, the escape system triggered erroneously, shutting down all the Proton engines and flinging the Zond capsule clear, saving the cabin which came down 520 km away, but thereby wrecking the mission in the process. A replacement mission was planned for 22nd July, but in a bizarre pad accident in which at least one person died, block D and the L-1 toppled over onto the launch tower. Extracting the stages without causing an explosion took several nail-biting days. Further launchings were then postponed till the autumn.

The early L-1 Zond missions

10 Mar 1967 Cosmos 146

8 Apr 1967 Cosmos 154 (fail)

28 Sep 1967 Failure

23 Nov 1967 Failure

4 Mar 1968 Zond 4

23 Apr 1968 Failure

Requalification of Soyuz

27 Oct 1967 Cosmos 186

30 Oct 1967 Cosmos 188

14 Apr 1968 Cosmos 212

15 Apr 1968 Cosmos 213

With the flight of Zond 6, the Western press rediscovered the moon race. Time magazine ran a cover of an American and a Russian in a spacesuit elbowing one another out of the way as each raced moonbound. Newspapers printed cutaway drawings of ‘The Zond plan’ and ‘The Apollo plan’. Apollo 8 astronauts Borman, Lovell and Anders were right in the middle of their pre-flight checks. Their Saturn V was already on the pad. In London, Independent Television prepared to go on air with special news features the moment Zond went up. Models and spacesuits decorated the studio. The American Navy even broke international convention to sail eavesdrop­ping warships into the Black Sea to get close to the control centre in Yevpatoria. The Americans had Baikonour under daily surveillance by Corona spy satellites. The whole world was waiting…

The launch window at Baikonour opened on 7th December. No manned Russian launching took place, to the evident disappointment of the Western media. They were of course unaware of the many problems that had arisen on Zond 5 or the even more serious ones on Zond 6. The Russians were in no position to fly to the moon in December 1968.

We now know that there were intense debates within the management of the Soviet L-1 programme in November and that many options were considered. The records of the time, like the Kamanin diaries, are contradictory and even confusing at

times, but they reflected the dilemmas faced by the programme leaders. On the one hand, they did not wish to be panicked into a premature response to what they considered to be the reckless American decision to send Apollo 8 to the moon; at the same time, they realized that, with their Zond experience, they were more prepared for a lunar journey than the Americans. The cosmonauts openly expressed their willingness to make the journey to the moon ahead of Apollo 8 – several report that they sent a letter to the Politburo – but as one government minister commented, ‘they would, wouldn’t they.’ It seems that Mishin’s natural caution prevailed. Years later, Mishin told interviewers that he had recommended to the state commission against such a mission: neither Zond nor Proton were yet safe. The state commission had agreed.

The success of Apollo 8 brought mixed feelings in the Russian camp. Leaders of the Soviet space programme were full of admiration for the American achievement, which they still regarded as a huge gamble. The Americans had gone one stage further than Zond, for Apollo 8 orbited the moon ten times. The Russians were full of regrets that they had not done it first and wondered whether they had made the best use of their time and resources since the first L-1 was launched in March 1967. The head of the cosmonaut squad, General Kamanin, made no attempt to downplay the signifi­cance of the American achievement. I had hoped one day to fly from Kazakhstan to Moscow on an airplane with our cosmonauts after they had circled the moon, he confided in his diary. Now he had the sinking feeling that such a pleasurable airplane flight would never happen.

The state commission overseeing the L-1 project met on 27th December and the safe return of Apollo 8, which took place that day, was very much in their minds. They set dates for the next L-1 launches at almost monthly intervals in early 1969, starting on 20th January 1969. Some asked What is the point?, a moot question granted that such a mission would now achieve less than Apollo 8. The L-1 Zond programme continued, with diminishing conviction, but no one proposed cancellation.

The government’s military industrial commission met three days later on 30th December. The commission underlined the value of unmanned lunar exploration and laid down a new official line on the moon programme. The Soviet Union had always planned to explore the moon by robots and would never risk lives for political propaganda. The Soviet media were invited to advertise the virtues of safer, cheaper unmanned probes. This was the first step in starting the myth, which was the official position for 20 years, that there never had been a moon race. There was little discussion of the moon-landing programme, which was now ready for the first launch of the N-1. A meeting of the party and government on the issue was set for a week later, on 8th January.

By the 21st, Luna 16 had spent a full day on the moon. There was still no official indication as to its purpose. Jodrell Bank reported still more strong signals. In fact, what Luna 16 was doing was checking out its exact landing coordinates so as to give the best possible return trajectory. Luna 16 had landed at the lunar equator at 56°E, the perfect place for the direct return to Earth on Dmitri Okhotsimsky’s passive trajectory. The return system would now be put to the test.

All was now set for the return of the ascent stage to Earth. The top stage of Luna 16 weighed 520 kg, with the recoverable cabin. There was one engine on the ascent stage, the KRD-61 of the Isayev design bureau. Burning 245 kg of UDMH and nitric oxide, the ascent stage had a specific impulse of 313 sec and could burn just once for 53 sec, sufficient to achieve a velocity of between 2,600 m/sec and 2,700 m/sec. A complication of the 2.9 day return flight was that – to recover the spacecraft in the normal Kazakhstan landing site – liftoff would take place out of sight from Yevpatoria: the moon would be over the Atlantic, where it could be followed by a Soviet tracking ship offshore Cuba.

Twenty-six hours after landing, explosive bolts were fired above the Luna 16 descent stage. On a jet of flame, the upper stage shot off and headed towards the white and blue Earth hanging in the distance. It headed straight up, motor still purring, building up to lunar escape velocity, its radio pouring out details from the four aerials poking out the side. The Sea of Fertility returned to the quiet it had known for eons. The descent stage was the only forlorn reminder of the brief visit. The lower stage on the moon continued to transmit signals for a couple of days until the battery ran out. Only two instruments seem to have been carried: a thermometer and radiation counter.

The returning rocket – capsule, instrument container, fuel tanks and motors – reported back from time to time as it headed for a straight nosedive reentry. These coordinates had to be as precise as possible so as to best predict the landing spot on Earth. At 48,000 km out, the tiny capsule separated from the instrument and rocket package, plunged into the upper atmosphere, glowed red and then white as tempera­tures rose to 10,000°C as it hit forces of 350 G. Helicopters were already in the air as a parachute ballooned out at 14,500 m. The capsule hit the ground and beacons began sending out a bright beep! beep! signal as rescuers rushed to collect the precious cargo. The mathematicians had done their job well, for Luna 16 came down 30 km from the middle of the intended recovery zone, 80 km southeast of Dzhezhkazgan, Kazakhstan.

The small capsule was transferred to a plane and flown at once to Moscow to the Vernadsky Institute of Geological and Analytical Chemistry for analysis. The person in charge of assessing the lunar soil was Valeri Barsukov (1928-92), subsequently to become director of the institute (1976-92). How the scientists ever got the soil container open is a mystery for the entire outer skin of the capsule may well have been welded by the intense heat of the fiery return. Once open, the grey grains of moon dust poured out – loose lumps of dark grey, blackish powder like very dark, wet beach sand. It had small grains at the top and large grains at the bottom where it had begun to encounter rock.

The sample, although small (105 g), provided a considerable amount of scientific information [2]. The following were the main features: [11]

It was a tremendous triumph. The Luna 16 mission had gone perfectly from start to finish. The tricky stages of soft-landing, drilling and take-off were just like the book said they should be. ‘It’s the decade of the space robot!’ heralded the Soviet press. The USSR made great play of how such flights were cheaper than manned flights like Apollo, how they did not expose humans to danger and how versatile space robots could land just about anywhere.

For NASA and Western observers the real significance of Luna 16 lay elsewhere: it confirmed what many, but not all of them, had suspected was Luna 15’s real purpose, namely that it was a real challenge to Apollo 11a year earlier. Russia did have good grounds to celebrate Luna 16. Some of the remarks about its low cost and versatility were exaggerated and Luna 16’s sample of 105 g was tiny com­pared with Apollo, each mission of which brought back well over 20 kg. Luna 16 did not have the same capacity to search around for and select samples as the men of Apollo, for the arm would set the drill into the nearest piece of adjacent surface regardless. The Russians later exchanged 3g of Luna 16 samples for 3g each from Apollo 11 and 12. Many years later, the Russians sold 2 mg of soil at Sotheby’s in New York, fetching an out-of-the-world price of $442,500. The results of the soil analysis were published in a number of scientific papers over the following years.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? LOCATION OF SOVIET MOON PROBES

These are the current locations of Soviet moon probes:

The Soviet moon ship was the LOK (Luniy Orbitalny Korabl). Unlike the L-1 Zond, the LOK had a direct point of comparison with American hardware – the Apollo command-and-service module. Sixteen began construction, seven were completed and parts of four can still be found in museums. The LOK flew only once, on the fourth N-1 launch in November 1972, when it was destroyed, although the descent module was saved by the escape system. The traditional engineering view of the LOK is that it was a beefed-up Soyuz able to fly to the moon, but it was much more capable than that – a versatile lunar spaceship in its own right, a worthy contemporary to Apollo [17].

The descent module was the same as the normal Soyuz – but designed for a crew of two, not three; and with a thicker heat shield for the high reentry speed. The LOK weighed more, 3,050 kg, rather than 2,850 kg. The orbital module was similar to the normal Soyuz, but with different instrumentation, controls and many additional portholes for lunar orbit observations. The spacesuit for the moonwalk would be housed here, and it was from this module that the spacesuited cosmonaut would leave on his moonwalk to climb into the lunar module (LK) and begin the descent to the lunar surface. The orbital module had a large hatch, 90 cm, sufficiently wide to permit the cosmonaut to exit in the Kretchet lunar suit. The orbital module had a control unit for masterminding the link-up in lunar orbit after the landing and a forward-looking porthole. Rendezvous and docking would be controlled from there, not from the descent module.

Compared with Soyuz, it had a much larger skirt at the base, an additional small forward module and a docking system at the front, called Kontakt. A series of antennae and helices were used to zone in on the returning landing module, the LK, for rendezvous and docking. The LOK’s probe, called Aktiv, would penetrate an aluminium plate on the top of the LK. It had 108 recessed honeycomb hexagons on a plate 100 cm across and entry to only one of these would be sufficient to achieve a firm capture.

The most visible differences from Soyuz were in the instrument-and-propulsion module at the rear and the small extra module at the front. The 800 kg front module contained six fuel tanks, each with 300 kg of UDMH, four engines for attitude control in lunar orbit, an orientation engine and the Kontakt docking unit. On Apollo, there was a small conical docking unit on the front of the command module, but the other elements were made an integral part of the service module. For rendezvous, the LOK closed in on the LK in lunar orbit, the flight engineer peering through the forward­looking porthole, using television and handling an adjacent control panel. The front module of the LOK had four attitude control thruster units, each with two main nozzles and two small ones. The engine system was made by the Arsenal Design Bureau in Leningrad.

At the rear, the LOK carried two propulsion sets. The biggest was the main engine for the return to Earth, the equivalent of the Service Propulsion System of Apollo. The LOK’s engine had a thrust of 3,388 kg and a specific impulse of 314 and its primary purpose was to make the trans-Earth injection burn out of lunar orbit. The engine, called the S5.51, was built by the Isayev design bureau. The LOK also carried the standard Soyuz engine, to be used as a rendezvous motor, with a thrust of 417 kg, a specific impulse of 296 and capable of 35 restarts. The LOK carried 2,032 kg of nitrogen tetroxide and 1,120 kg of UMDH. The LOK was the first Soviet spacecraft to carry the fuel cells pioneered by the Americans in the Gemini programme: 20 Volna cells, weight 70 kg, able to supply 1.5 kW for ten days. They were made by the Ural Electrochemical Enterprise. The only other Soviet spaceship to carry fuel cells was the Buran space shuttle in 1988. The rear section carried radiator shutters to shed heat. At the junction with the descent module were star trackers.

LOK’s arrival in lunar orbit followed a different procedure from Apollo. The mid­course manoeuvre and lunar orbit insertion were done by block D, not by the LOK’s main engine. Block D would again be used to lower the orbit of the LOK and LK over the lunar surface to its final orbit dipping to 16 km and, finally, for all but the final part of the powered descent of the LK. On Apollo, the Service Propulsion System carried out the mid-course correction moonbound, lunar orbit insertion and lunar orbit corrections.

With the LK down on the surface, the profile of the LOK now closely approxi­mated that of the Apollo command-and-service module. The LOK would orbit the moon, a sole cosmonaut flight engineer aboard, like the single astronaut on the Apollo. For half of each orbit, it would be around the farside of the moon, out of contact with the Earth. Once the LK blasted off from the lunar surface, it was the task of the LOK to locate the rising LK, close in and dock. The Kontakt system was designed in such a way that a simple contact would join the spacecraft together, so there was no question of hard and soft dockings. Unlike Apollo, the LK cosmonaut would transfer externally back to the LOK by spacewalk. The LK would, like the American LM, then be jettisoned. The LOK would then make the crucial burn out of lunar orbit, make the three day coast back to Earth, carry out two mid-course corrections (one at mid-point, one just before reentry) and then make a Zond-type skip reentry.

Source: RKK Energiya (2001)

What would a Russian Zond around-the-moon mission have been like? The Proton rocket would have been fuelled up about eight hours before liftoff. This is carried out automatically, pipes carrying the nitric acid and UDMH into the bottom stages, liquid oxygen and kerosene into block D. The crew – Alexei Leonov and Oleg Makarov for the first mission – would have gone aboard 2.5 hours before liftoff. Dressed in light grey coveralls and communication soft hats, standing at the bottom of the lift that would bring them up to the cabin, they would have offered some words of encourage­ment to the launch crews overseeing the mission. The payload goes on internal power from two hours before liftoff. The pad area is then evacuated and the tower rolled back to 200 m distant, leaving the rocket standing completely free. There may be a wisp of oxidizer blowing off the top stage, but otherwise the scene is eerily silent, for these are storable fuels. The launch command goes in at 10 sec and the fuels start to mix with the nitric acid. This is an explosive combination, so the engines start to fire at once, making a dull thud. As they do so, orange-brown smoke begins to rush out of the flame trench, the Proton sitting there amidst two powerful currents of vapour pouring out from either side. As the smoke billows out, Proton is airborne, with debris and stones from the launch area flying out in all directions. Twelve seconds into the mission, Proton rolls over in its climb to point in the right direction. A minute into the mission Proton goes through the sound barrier. Vibration is now at its greatest, as are

the G forces, 4 G. The second-stage engines begin to light at 120 sec, just as the first – stage engines are completing their burn. Proton is now 50 km high, the first stage falls away and there is an onion ring wisp of cloud as the new stage takes over. Proton is now lost to sight and those lucky enough to see the launch go back indoors to keep warm. Then, 334 sec into the mission, small thrusters fire the second stage downward so that the third stage can begin its work. It completes its work at 584 sec and the rocket is now in orbit.

Once in orbit, the precise angle for translunar injection is recalculated by the instrumentation system on block D. The engine of block D is fired 80 min later over the Atlantic Ocean as it passes over a Soviet tracking ship. The cosmonauts would have experienced relatively gentle G forces, but in no time would be soaring high above Earth, seeing our planet and its blues and whites in a way that could never be imagined from the relative safety of low-Earth orbit. At this stage, with Zond safely on its way to the moon, Moscow Radio and Television would have announced the

launching. Televised pictures would be transmitted of the two cosmonauts in the cabin and they would probably have pointed their handheld camera out of the porthole to see the round Earth diminish in the distance. The spaceship would not have been called Zond. Several names were even tossed around, like Rossiya (Russia), Sovietsky Rossiya (Soviet Russia) and Sovietsky Soyuz (Soviet Union), but the favourite one was the Akademik Sergei Korolev, dedicating the mission to the memory of the great designer.

Day 2 of the mission would be dominated by the mid-course correction. This would be done automatically, but the cosmonauts would check that the system appeared to be working properly. Although the Earth was ever more receding into the distance, the cosmonauts would see little of the moon as they approached, only the thin sliver of its western edge. Zond’s dish would be pointed at Earth for most of the mission in any case.

Highlight of the mission would be at the end of day 3. Zond would fall into the gravity well of the moon, gradually picking up speed as it approached the swing-by, although this would be little evident in the cabin itself. Then, at the appointed moment, Zond would dip under the southwestern limb of the moon. At that very moment, the communications link with ground control in Yevpatoria would be lost, blocked by the moon. The spaceship would be silent now, apart from the hum of the airconditioning. For the next 45 min, the entire face of the moon’s farside would fill

their portholes, passing by only 1,200 km below. The commander would keep a firm lock on the moon, while the flight engineer would take pictures of the farside peaks, jumbled highlands and craters, for the farside of the moon has few seas or mare. As they soared around the farside, the cosmonauts would be conscious of coming around the limb of the moon. The black of the sky would fill their view above as the moon receded below. As they rounded the moon, they would have seen a nearly full round Earth coming over the horizon, not the crescent enjoyed by Apollo 8. The Akademik Sergei Korolev would reestablish radio contact with Yevpatoria. This would be one of the great moments of the mission, for the cosmonauts would now describe everything that they saw below and presently behind them and as soon as possible beam down television as well as radio. Their excited comments would later be replayed time and time again.

A mid-course correction would be the main feature at the end of day 4. The atmosphere would be relaxed, after the excitement of the previous day, but in the background was the awareness that the most dangerous manoeuvre of the mission lay ahead. The course home would be checked time and time again, with a final adjust­ment made 90,000 km out, done by the crew if the automatic system failed. The southern hemisphere would grow and grow in Zond’s window. Contact with the ground stations in Russia would be lost, though attempts would be made to retain communications through ships at sea. The two cosmonauts would soon perceive Zond to be picking up speed. Strapping themselves in their cabin, they would drop the service module and their own high-gain antenna and then they would tilt the heat – shield of their acorn-shaped cabin at the correct angle in the direction of flight. This was a manoeuvre they had practised a hundred times or more. Now they would feel the gravity forces again, for the first time in six days, as Zond burrowed into the atmosphere. After a little while, they would sense the cushion of air building under Zond and the spacecraft rising again. The G loads would lighten and weightlessness would briefly return as the cabin swung around half the world in darkness on its long, fast, skimming trajectory. Then the G forces would return as it dived in a second occasion. This time the G forces grew and grew and the cabin began to glow outside the window as it went through the flames of reentry, ‘like being on the inside of a blowtorch’ as Nikolai Rukhavishnikov later described reentry. Eventually, after all the bumps, there was a thump as the parachute came out, a heave upward as the canopy caught the air and a gentle, swinging descent. As the cabin reached the flat steppe of Kazakhstan, retrorockets would fire for a second underneath to cushion the landing. On some landings the cabin comes down upright, on others it would roll over. Hopefully, the helicopter ground crews would soon be on hand to pull the cosmonauts out. What a story they would have to tell! What a party in Moscow afterwards! The charred, still hot Akademik Sergei Korolev would be examined, inspected, checked and brought to a suitable, prominent place of reverence in a museum to be admired for all eternity.