It finally seemed as though my country’s lunar program was beginning to move, like an army advancing on three fronts.
Zond 5 carried a “crew”: a number of turtles, worms, and flies, in addition to some scientific instruments and cameras. On September 18, the spacecraft made its closest approach to the Moon, coming to within 1,950 kilometers of those gray craters and plains as it swung around the far side. Then it headed back toward Earth, speeding up to what Pravda called the “second cosmic velocity”—that is, the speed at which a spacecraft reentered the atmosphere, as opposed to the first cosmic velocity, which was required to leave Earth’s gravity — aiming toward a window in space no more than thirteen kilometers across.
There was incredible tension among the team in the control center. The failure of the star tracker and the reliance on the relatively crude Earth-Moon orientation system meant that Zond 5 could not be steered onto a precise trajectory. It was going through that window more or less by luck and momentum, and where it would wind up, nobody could say.
The rescue-and-recovery forces, having learned their lesson, were set up for ocean recovery this time. There would be no self-destruct if Zond 5 managed to survive reentry.
Zond 5 reached the second cosmic velocity of eleven kilometers a second as it dived into the atmosphere on September 21, the external heat on the skin of the spacecraft reaching thirteen thousand degrees centigrade. The deceleration subjected the worms, turtles, and flies to as much as sixteen Gs — more than twice the desirable load. (And after having been spun up to eight Gs twice within the past month, I could not imagine a crew functioning for long at sixteen. Or at all.)
We expected to wait half an hour or longer to learn the fate of our lunar craft, but within five minutes of the projected landing time, the rescue service reported that Zond 5 had survived its passage back to Earth, splashing down in the Indian Ocean one hundred and five kilometers from the tracking ship Borovichy. The turtles and their companions were alive.
The crew of the Borovichy turned the blackened bell of Zond 5 over to an oceanographic ship, the Golovnin, which carried it to Bombay for flight back to the USSR.
On the morning of September 22, 1968, there was not a drop of alcohol to be found within fifty kilometers of the Yevpatoriya Station. I am ashamed to say I consumed my share, and perhaps more. The last thing I remember is a very drunken Saditsky telling me, “Now we’ve screwed ourselves. If we’d flown Soyuz with a crew last month, we would be ready to launch a manned L-1. We could have beaten the Americans around the Moon.”
I didn’t believe Saditsky. The Americans hadn’t flown Apollo at all.
By the end of September, autumn was already half over, with the trees around Star Town shedding their leaves. I could recall only a few days of summer — no surprise, given that I had spent almost three full months away from home.
Even back at Star Town, I had little free time. Our group training continued with more intensity, though without Sasha Korchugin, who had lost flight status for good and was given a position on the Gagarin Center staff. Part of the syllabus was a series of rides in the back seats of MiG-15 trainers for the nonpilots in the group. Pilots like Shiborin were allowed to fly in the front seats, though always with an instructor from the 70th Seregin Squadron.
Given that my greatest exposure to a MiG-15 was in picking up its shattered pieces, I approached these flights with dread, but found myself enjoying them — half-hour hops out to Kirzhach, then back. On a couple of occasions the instructors let me take the controls, and I got some small sense of how exciting it must be to totally master a fighter jet. No wonder the pilots I knew — Shiborin, Saditsky, Triyanov, even my father — were such arrogant shits most of the time. They had proven themselves in a whole different world.
On October 11, the Americans launched their first manned Apollo, nineteen months behind their original schedule. The eleven-day flight by astronauts Schirra, Eisele, and Cunningham went flawlessly from a technical standpoint, though the crew often quarreled publicly with flight controllers. Hearing this, Shiborin shook his head in amazement. “What kind of training do these Americans have? If a Soviet crew acted that way, they’d get court-martialed!”
This was Shiborin at his most naive. Even as he was watching the antics of Captain Schirra with astonishment, Colonel Beregovoy, the veteran test pilot and cosmonaut assigned to the first manned Soyuz, was failing his final examinations on docking procedures while his backup pilot, Shatalov, was acing them.
Did this make any difference to Beregovoy’s assignment? Not a bit. He had friends in high places, even higher than General Kamanin, and extra tutoring was arranged. On October 26, 1968, he was launched into orbit aboard spacecraft Number 10, officially named Soyuz 3 and designed to be the active partner in a docking. (Spacecraft Number 11, his target, was launched the day before, though not announced and named as Soyuz 2 until Beregovoy was safely in space.)
Beregovoy’s Soyuz was supposed to approach its target on autopilot during the first orbit. At a distance of 180 meters, he took over manual control, and then the fun began. Beregovoy closed in on Soyuz 2, only to turn away before docking. He radioed that his orientation system had failed. He was allowed to maneuver Soyuz 3 away and get some rest before another attempt on the second day.
This one went no better. Beregovoy got to within fifty meters this time, then somehow went sailing past. Again, he blamed the guidance system.
By this time there was no fuel in either Soyuz for additional attempts. At Yevpatoriya there were concerns about Beregovoy’s physical state; sensors detected some impurities in the atmosphere aboard Soyuz, which might have affected him.
Soyuz 2 thumped down safely on October 28 and Beregovoy himself followed two days later. He faced some harsh questioning from members of the State Commission, including Artemov and Kamanin, and like any good pilot, stuck to his story that the docking guidance system had failed him. Privately the cosmonauts said it was Beregovoy’s error, but since he was the only one aboard, who was going to contradict him?
And to be fair, a postflight investigation showed a whole series of problems that contributed to the failure, beginning with our desire to risk only a single pilot when Soyuz was designed to operate with a pilot and flight engineer. Many of Beregovoy’s difficult maneuvers had to be carried out in zones where he had no contact with Yevpatoriya or remote tracking stations, and often in literal darkness. Beregovoy did admit, later, that he had been ill the first day of the flight, which surely hadn’t helped him. And the Soyuz controls did not match those in the simulator he had trained on so doggedly.
Nevertheless, a cosmonaut had survived a Soyuz flight. Plans were made for an ambitious follow-up — a docking between two manned Soyuz in January, with an EVA by two cosmonauts. This was, of course, the same mission originally intended to be flown in April 1967. Saditsky was assigned as commander of one of the four crews.