The 1970 image of the moon was sent by Zond 8.īack in the United States, the CIA had prepared a report as part of President Richard Nixon’s “Daily Brief ” for July 5 that began: “A major Soviet unmanned space launch toward the moon on 3 July ended in failure as a result of an explosion.” Hard evidence would come later. This test model is in the Science Museum in London. The Soviet equivalent of the Apollo Lunar Module was the LK (Lunnyi Korabl, or “Lunar Craft”). But all such hopes were dispelled by the powerful explosion of the rocket five seconds after launch…the failure has put us back another one or one-and-a-half years.” In his private diary that night, Kamanin wrote a lament: “We are desperate for a success, especially now when the American astronaut Frank Borman is our guest. On July 3, the secret moon rocket known as the N-1 had exploded in a fireball at the remote launch site at Baikonur in Kazakhstan, destroying one of two launch pads. ![]() Yet Kamanin knew something neither Borman nor the journalists knew: The moon race was already lost. When a journalist asked whether the Soviet Union was going to launch a mission to the moon to preempt Apollo 11, Kamanin and the cosmonauts would neither confirm nor deny it. ![]() One of the few Soviet space program managers with a public profile, Kamanin was also a national hero who had come to prominence back in the 1930s for leading a daring Arctic rescue. The following day, Borman visited the Cosmonaut Training Center at Star City, where he met with cosmonaut coordinator Nikolai Kamanin. Embassy compound in Moscow, surrounded by several veteran cosmonauts who seemed reticent if not outright glum. On the evening of July 4, 1969, Borman was at the ornate U.S. American astronauts were getting ready to land on the moon while it appeared as if the Soviets had ceded the race. The visit had been planned for months but the timing could not have been worse. ![]() About two weeks before the Apollo 11 mission was launched to the moon, Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman was in Moscow on a courtesy trip on behalf of NASA.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |