After the applause, whistles and the clinking of vodka bottles with which the night had started, silence now extends through the control center of Yevpatoria like a cold blizzard. The Soviet engineers, standing scattered in front of the monitors, can almost feel their icy, wet touch on their skin. All eyes are focused on the same person: Vasili Mishin, the chief designer who arrived from Baikonur to supervise the launch of the Soyud spacecraft of the Zond 5 mission.
Sitting in front of the computers, Mishin does not take his penetrating eyes off the flashing lights on the panel. The Soyud which shortly before had successfully taken off towards the Moon (with a Proton rocket) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, is having problems. And serious. With each clearing of Mishin’s throat, the silence in the Yevpatoria room becomes denser and denser.
Although, like the rest of his comrades, Mishin had celebrated the takeoff of the Soyud ship in style, now beneath his thick, tangled eyebrows his pupils shine with a concentrated expression. History remembers him as “the loser in the race to the moon“, but that night he hits the nail on the head. Before the expectant gaze of his colleagues (and the distant but overwhelming tutelage of the Moscow leaders, immersed at that time in the space race with the United States), Mishin gives some precise and the ship 7K-L1 solves its first incident.
The gyrfalcons of Moscow breathe a sigh of relief. Mishin’s brow relaxes. And at the Yevpatoria control center, bottles of vodka are being uncorked again. The celebration continues.
Zond 5 at the time of being rescued. (POT)
It is the night of September 14-15, 1968. Hundreds of meters above the heads of Mishin and the Yevpatoria engineers, 7k-L1 rises unstoppably towards the Moon. The journey of Zond 5 will go down in history for being the first probe to hit one turn around the satellite and return to Earth. An odyssey not without difficulties. The problem that the ship registered shortly after taking off from Kazakhstan would not be the only one on its eventful journey.
Zond and his peculiar crew
Zond 5 does not attract attention, however, due to the incidents it has had since its takeoff. He does it for the curious crew that was on board. The same one that would have perished in space if Mishin and the rest of the Yevpatoria team had not shown their cold blood.
In order to check whether trips around the Moon could pose any problems for astronauts, the Soviets introduced Zond 5 capsule fruit flies, worms, plants, seeds, bacteria and… two turtlestwo copies of Testudo horsfieldii. In the pilot’s seat there was also a mannequin that emulated a Soviet astronaut: it was 1.75 meters tall and weighed 70 kilos. Space technicians had inserted sensors to monitor the levels of radiation to which he was exposed.
A peculiar Noah’s Ark… With a rag and plastic Noah at the controls.
Scientists with turtles in their hands.
As Brian Harvey tells it in Soviet and Russian Lunar Explorationthe turtles had to face a journey worthy of Hollywood. On the way to the Moon, part of the mechanism contaminated and became unusable. During their return to Earth, another incident prevented the operation from proceeding as planned. The work that the Soviets had done left much to be desired: the sensor to locate the Earth was poorly mounted and the optics of the stellar sensors were blocked by the thermal insulation.
On their return, the Chelonians had to endure a tremendous sway. The violent descent caused the outer shield of the ship (which weighed about 5,400 kilos) to reach very high temperatures.
The capsule landed in the Indian Ocean on September 21, around seven in the afternoon. Their large parachutes were deployed to cushion the fall and beacons marked their location, not far from the Borovichy ship, who took it out of the water the next morning. From there he transferred to the cargo ship Viasili Golovin bound for Bombay, where he embarked on a Antono planev that took her back to the USSR. When they checked the interior of the ship, the technicians met the watery eyes of the pair of intrepid turtles who had flown around the Moon.
They arrived before all of us. (Schorle/Wikipedia)
Although their health was good, the turtles looked like two newcomers from the war: they had lost 10% of their body weight, they were starving (they had not eaten since days before takeoff, when they were placed in the capsule) and to make matters worse, it is said that one of them had hurt her eye. Not a bad balance if you take into account the stellar journey they had undergone.
Their triumphant return after making a historic return to the Moon, however, did not help them save their lives. What the violent splashdown in the Indian Ocean had not done, scientists from the USSR did shortly after. After your first exam they sacrificed to perform an autopsy on them and study them in depth. The trip that had ended successfully. Zond 5 had been about 1,950 kilometers from the Moon and made a historic circumlunar journey. He also left impressive images for posterity.
The Legacy of the Space Turtles
The maneuvers of the Zond 5 mission generated excitement even outside Soviet borders. At the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Manchester, the famous radio astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell He tracked the ship. The English center would set off alarms by intercepting a message with a human voice that had its origins in Soviet ingenuity. Had the USSR managed to make a trip around the Moon piloted by an astronaut?
In reality, what they were listening to was a recording to test transmissions in space. Among the voices they heard in Manchester was in fact that of the veteran Russian cosmonaut Valeri Bykovsky.
On the pages of the book Animals in SpaceColin Burgess and Chris Dubbs point out that the voice was detected on the night of September 19 to 20, while the ship with the pair of chelonians began its journey. bumpy return to Earth. “It is now believed that the voices were actually those of cosmonauts involved in the lunar landing program. They had located themselves at Soviet tracking stations and were transmitting reports via Zond 5 to practice their roles as part of a real lunar team,” Burgess and Dubbs comment.
Those of Zond 5 were not the only crew members with shells who participated in a space trip. The Zond 6, in 1968, also had what NASA defines as a “biological burden.” The animals that formed it, however, suffered worse luck: the capsule in which they traveled collapsed. depressurized and crashed on its way back to Earth. The Chelonians returned to Zond 8, years later. And they would also be present among the passage of Soyuz 20, which took off in 1975 and kept the reptiles in space for 90 days.
Although turtles stand out for the frequency with which they have visited space, they are not the only animals that have boarded a rocket to undertake a stellar journey.
In fact, when Yuri Gagarin became the first human to reach outer space in 1961, his eyes contemplated a panorama which they had already enjoyed before insects, apesdogs… The pioneers were the fruit flies, who had boarded the V-2 rocket in 1946. Three years later, the monkey Albert II undertook a similar journey aboard the same model. Although his experience was dramatic (the poor man died when the capsule’s parachute failed), years later, in 1959, other apes would follow in his footsteps, such as Able and Baker, Sam or Ham (1961).
Laika, pioneer.
Mice, frogs, fish, spiders, cats, guinea pigs and dogs were added to that list. Much more famous than the turtles of Zond 5 is the dog Laikawhich took off aboard the Sputnik 2 rocket in early November 1957. Their story is even sadder than that of the cosmochelonians. The USSR took care of the operation to put Sputnik 2 into orbit, but forgot how to recover it. The poor dog died in her tiny capsule, a victim of stress and overheating in the cabin.
Laika’s “metal coffin” would make another 2,370 turns in orbit before incinerating upon entering the atmosphere on April 14, six decades ago. Two years later, in August 1960, the canine pair Strelka and Belka took off from Baikonur and under the supervision of Vladimir Yazdovski. Between 1948 and 1961 they entered space 48 dogs15 monkeys and two rabbits. Twenty-seven died. Just like the shelled astronauts of Zond 5 are the pioneers who paved the way for astronauts.
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