Newsgroups: sci.space.history
From: henry@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Soyuz and Zond and a Pre-Apollo-8 Flight
Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2001 19:41:52 GMT

In article <_SLj6.4848$Vy2.481788@typhoon.mn.mediaone.net>,
Doug... <dvandorn@mn.rr.com> wrote:
>I read recently (I forget exactly which book or article it was in) that
>Pavel Belyayev was sitting in a Zond, all alone (single pilot) on top of a
>Proton in late November/early December of 1968, when a technical glitch in
>the Proton scrubbed the launch and the window for the lunar trajectory was
>lost...

As others have noted, this is known to be false.  In particular, it's not
necessary to invoke last-minute bad luck to explain why there was no
attempt to preempt Apollo 8 -- the Soviets were still debugging Zond.

American fears of such a flight were based on the belief that Zond 6 had
been a success... but while it looked that way from afar, in fact there
had been a major pressurization failure, whose indirect consequences
included a malfunction of the parachute system.  The lunar-farside
pictures and other data obtained from Zond 6 were the results of a
difficult salvage job on the smashed wreckage of the reentry capsule.

In fact, there weren't plans to attempt a December manned flight even
before that.  Korolev's long-established ground rules called for two
successful unmanned tests before a manned flight, and Zond 5 was not
considered close enough to a full success.  The Kamanin diaries confirm
that Zond 6 was to be the first of *two* unmanned dress rehearsals, the
second slated for early December, with a manned flight penciled in for
January.  The second unmanned flight was postponed after the Zond 6
disaster, and so there wasn't any possibility of attempting a manned
flight in December.

>The next window would have been the late December window Apollo 8
>used...

Actually, no, the Soviet launch window was earlier in the month -- the
different latitudes of the launch sites caused some differences in
trajectory that dictated different windows.
--
When failure is not an option, success  |  Henry Spencer   henry@spsystems.net
can get expensive.   -- Peter Stibrany  |      (aka henry@zoo.toronto.edu)

Newsgroups: sci.space.history
From: henry@spsystems.net (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Soyuz and Zond and a Pre-Apollo-8 Flight
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2001 16:17:50 GMT

In article <V11k6.5612$Vy2.692903@typhoon.mn.mediaone.net>,
Doug... <dvandorn@mn.rr.com> wrote:
>Thanks, Henry and Michael and everyone else, for establishing the apocryphal
>nature of the story...

Oh yes, by the way, a reference:  Asif Siddiqi's recent book, "Challenge
to Apollo", is pretty clearly the definitive source on things like this
now, with Harford's "Korolev" the runner-up.
--
When failure is not an option, success  |  Henry Spencer   henry@spsystems.net
can get expensive.   -- Peter Stibrany  |      (aka henry@zoo.toronto.edu)