Space: Russia’s Race to the Moon

The first important news of Russia’s latest space venture came, as it has so often in the past, not from a Moscow spokesman but from a distinguished British scientist. Closemouthed Soviet scientists announced only that a space craft called Zond 5 had been launched into deep space from a parking orbit around the earth. But after Astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell trained his 250-ft. Jodrell Bank radio telescope on the receding craft and analyzed its signals, he told the world exactly what the Russians were trying to do. Zond’s mission, he stated, was to fly around the moon and return for a safe landing on earth, a feat never before accomplished.

If that was the plan, the Russians were understandably secretive. For the more ambitious the mission, the more embarrassing it would be to have to admit failure if anything went wrong. “A base canard,” said a Soviet spokesman in response to Lovell’s statement. But Lovell had strong evidence to back up his story. Zond 5 had been tumbling as it approached the moon, he said, but it was finally stabilized. It passed about 1,200 miles from the lunar surface, radioing back great bursts of data and even voice transmissions—probably from a tape recorder. Finally there was a dramatic change in the transmissions and an enormous increase in power. “The whole exercise—the time of the launching, the content of the signals and the test of the voice transmitter—leaves no doubt whatsoever that this was a probe intended to come back,” Lovell insisted.

Proud Postscript. Just two days later, blandly ignoring their previous denial, the Soviets reported that Zond 5 had indeed flown around the moon. It carried out its “program of research in outer space,” they said, and was continuing on its flight. Then Lovell added a postscript: the Soviet news agency Tass, he told reporters, had actually called Jodrell Bank to ask what was happening to the spacecraft.

Toward week’s end, just as Lovell predicted, Jodrell Bank’s great telescope tracked the craft back to within 50,000 miles of the earth; then it was lost below the horizon. When Zond failed to reappear over the opposite horizon, Lovell announced that the Russians had probably brought it down in a recovery attempt. Then, after hours of silence that led many scientists to believe that the spacecraft had not survived its plunge into the earth’s atmosphere, Moscow made a dramatic announcement: Zond had splashed down “in a pre-set area of the Indian Ocean,” its scientific mission ”fully carried out,” and had been picked up by a Soviet ship. Western trackers confirmed the successful reentry, reporting that Zond had parachuted into the water at only 6.8 m.p.h.

Double Slap. The triumphant flight of Zond 5 and the test of its voice-communications system left little doubt that the Russians are racing to send a manned flight around the moon ahead of the U.S. which now plans to fly three astronauts on a lunar mission in December. The number of Russian space launchings announced this year—36 to only 18 for the U.S.—adds weight to the theory that the Soviets are working overtime on their space program.

The statistics also add impact to the parting words of James E. Webb, who resigned unexpectedly last week as head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “We are going to be in second position for some time to come,” said Webb in a speech that was generally regarded as a slap at both the Administration and Congress, which have made crippling cuts in NASA’s budgets.

He continued his complaint in his farewell press conference. “I think a good many people have tended to use the space program as a whipping boy,” he said. “I thought that we had reached parity with the Russians about two and a half years ago.” But the Soviets are proceeding “without letup” while the U.S. effort will have shrunk by mid-1969 to half what it was in the middle 1960s. As a result, Webb predicted, the Russians “will be flying more flights and developing a capability in space at a much more rapid rate than we will for the next several years.”