Evaluating Zond

Zond 5's successful loop around the moon and its safe recovery in the Indian Ocean provided fair warning last week that Russia is well and truly back in the race for the moon. Many scientists believe that the flight was merely a prelude to the circling of the moon by a Soviet cosmonaut, a mission that could be carried out within the next few months. But U.S. space officials are still hopeful that American astronauts can make a lunar landing before the Russians set foot on the moon.

Retiring NASA Chief James Webb was mightily impressed by Zond's flight, calling it "the most important demonstration of total space capacity up to now by any nation." British Astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, who predicts Russian probes almost as well as he tracks them, was certain that cosmonauts would soon follow in Zond's path. "Why else would they have transmitted the human voice that we recorded?" he asked. But the chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, Edward C. Welch, expressed confidence that the U.S. was still ahead in the lunar race.

Before making a lunar landing, space experts say, the Soviets will probably want to test two techniques that they have not yet attempted: 1) manned rendezvous and docking in space, and 2) an unmanned soft landing on the moon. Unmanned Russian spacecraft have twice rendezvoused and docked auto matically in earth orbit, but the technique would be far more difficult near the moon, 240,000 miles away from terrestrial control stations. And the Russians have yet to demonstrate a soft-landing system as reliable as the one that lowered five U.S. Surveyor spacecraft gently to the lunar surface.

The U.S. meanwhile is proceeding with plans to launch the first manned Apollo into earth orbit next week on a ten-day mission to check out spacecraft and ground control systems. If all goes well, the following Apollo flight, scheduled for late December, may take three astronauts for as many as ten orbits around the moon before returning them to earth.

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