Free One False Step by Richard Tongue Page B

start, problems with the on-board control systems became evident, and communications grew erratic. The spacecraft was brought down on an unplanned orbit, that would see it land far from the intended landing site.
     All that remained of the capsule upon landing was flaming wreckage. The parachute system failed; the first 'drogue' parachute opened correctly, but the main parachute did not. When the backup parachute deployed, it became tangled, and Soyuz 1 landed at terminal velocity. Just as the Americans had lost Apollo 1, intended as the first in a series of vehicles destined for the moon, the Soviets had now lost Soyuz 1. Despite being hit by this setback, the program continued. The vehicle that would be used to circumnavigate the moon became known as the L-1; later, it would be called Zond, sharing its name with a series of probes designed to test equipment for interplanetary probe flights.
     The Zond was a stripped down version of the Soyuz. In normal flight, the Soyuz had three modules; the Orbital Module would be stripped from the Zond to save weight. Soyuz had a maximum crew of three, the Zond only had a crew of two; the internal layout was also very different, to accommodate the different control systems that would be required for operations in lunar flights.
     One early point of contention was where the capsule should land. Traditionally, while American capsules landed at sea – with all the attendant expense of maintaining a series of naval task forces at various positions around the world for recovery operations – the Soviets preferred to bring their cosmonauts down on dry land. Partly this was forced on them; the Soviet Union did not have anything like as large a surface navy as the United States, and its capability for ocean recovery was far less developed. Coming down on land made recovery operations far simpler. The problem, however, came in a return from the Moon.
     There were two possibilities. Either the capsule could return over the northern hemisphere, where the tracking networks were properly developed – in which case it would splashdown in the Indian Ocean – or it could come in over the Indian Ocean, which a much inferior tracking network, and come down on land in the traditional manner. The Soyuz from which the Zond was derived was designed for land landings, but had the option of a water landing in an emergency. It is likely that a land landing would have been used in a manned flight – no-one would want to risk heroic lunar cosmonauts being retrieved by the United States Navy.
     Early testing of the Zond capsules was coloured by the death of Komorov on Soyuz 1, as well as the poor initial performance of its intended Proton booster. The first acknowledged Zond, Zond 4 (the earlier three had been earlier probe flights), flew to a comparable distance to the moon, but not to the moon itself, before returning, in order to test re-entry at higher speeds. This mission had two notable features. The first was two cosmonauts 'speaking' from the capsule using a relay, which must have caused some confusion to amateur observers at the time. The second was that the capsule was blown up when it returned to Earth!
     The plan had been for the Zond to 'skip' across the upper atmosphere in a difficult manoeuvre, taking it to the intended landing site. A minor systems failure meant that the 'skip' did not take place, and the craft was heading for the Gulf of Guinea. There had been some concerns that a descending capsule might be captured, and so it was fitted with a self-destruct device – which was detonated when it came so far off course.
     The destruction of the Zond must have alarmed the cosmonauts that were even then being trained to fly it. By October 1968, three crews had been assembled for the flight, including several of the most experienced in the cosmonaut team. The 'prime' crew were Alexei Leonov and Oleg Makarov. Leonov had famously made the first ever spacewalk in 1964 from Voshkod 2,