by Gideon Marcus

Painting the Town Red

On October 18, Soyuz 9 cosmonauts Andrian G. Nikolayev and Vitaly I. Sevastyanov arrived in Washington, D.C., to begin 10-day goodwill tour in the U.S. as NASA guests.  Here they are being greeted at Washington National Airport by Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong:

A few days later, they toured the Marshall Spaceflight Center and Alabama Space and Rocket Center during two-day visit to Huntsville, Alabama.

Then it was off to the West Coast for a junket that included stops from Seattle to the San Gabriel Valley.  It was all part of a goodwill tour that was actually a bilateral affair: an American team of NASA staff went to Moscow, apparently to discuss the possibility of a joint mission sometime in the 1970s.

But it was also a public relations coup for the Soviets, underscoring their latest space triumph: Zond 8.

Zond 8 was launched in the (local) evening of 20 October 1970.  The announced objectives of Zond 8 were "to carry out physical research along the flight path and the near-moon space, take pictures of the lunar surface, of the earth and the moon at different distances, check on improved on-board systems, units and the con-, struction of the spacecraft."  Interestingly, TASS let us know soon after the launch (well, the day after) about the mission and its profile without waiting to ensure that it was successful–a gamble that the Soviet news arm has been historically reluctant to take.

Armed with a camera and instruments for measuring the solar wind, Zond 8 got within 700 miles of the Moon on October 24th, returning this shot (among dozens) of Earth's companion:

Then it was back to home after two mid-course corrections.  In a deviation from prior flights, Zond 8 achieved a return trajectory over Earth's northern hemisphere instead of the standard southern approach profile, presumably to allow Soviet ground control stations to maintain near-continuous contact with the craft.  The reentry was also different from other reentries in the Zond program as it went over the north pole and landed in the Indian Ocean 453 miles southeast of the Chagos Islands (rather than the usual land landing in the Kazakhstan S.S.R.), and it was collected by the USSR recovery ship Taman.  Thus ended Zond 8's eight-day drip.

We've seen Zonds go to the Moon before, specifically Zond 5, Zond 6, and Zond 7, and given that the Soviets seem to have forgone human exploration of the Moon in favor of developing an orbital station, this unmanned redux of Apollo 8 seems like a superfluous effort.  But perhaps there's something brewing I don't know about…

Painting the town green

Crack open the latest issue of Analog Science Fiction, and a common theme arises: ecology.  It's the "in" word, these days, understanding the interactions of plants and animals that make up a complex biological system.  So it comes as little surprise that science fiction is turning its eye to this subject.  Let's see how editor Campbell's stable of authors take on the green theme:

Cover by Kelly Freas

Continue reading [October 31, 1970] In the Wabe (November 1970 Analog) →