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Before Chandrayaan, this lesser-known rescue mission of a space capsule occurred
Updated On: 01 October, 2023 08:03 AM IST | Mumbai | Jane Borges
While India beat Russia with Chandrayaan 3 in August, a lesser-known rescue mission of a space capsule that arrived at the Bombay Port 55 years ago, scripted the global success story of lunar programmes
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The Zond 5, carrying an extensive biological payload including two steppe tortoises, took off on September 14, 1968, on a Soviet Proton UR-500K rocket, landing in the Indian Ocean a week later. Pic Courtesy/SP Korolev RSC Energia; solarsystem.nasa.gov; The Zond 5 spacecraft being loaded onto the Antonov An-12 aircraft at Santa Cruz Airport in October 1968
For years now, Santa Cruz resident Debasish Chakraverty has been trying to untangle connections his fast-gentrifying neighbourhood has had with the rest of the city. It’s why the aviation enthusiast and historian spends a lot of time scouring through archival tomes—the hope is that it will lead him to hidden stories about the gentle suburb of his childhood. During one such exercise, Chakraverty remembers coming across a passing mention of how “the first spaceship to travel to and circle the Moon” had set foot in Bombay’s erstwhile Santa Cruz airport after completing its mission. “It got me curious,” he tells us over a phone call, “because I had never heard about this incident in local legend or lore”. As he dug deeper, poring over space science articles and online records, including that of NASA, Chakraverty was able to stitch a compelling portrait of how Mumbai came to “accidentally” play a role in one of the most epic space missions—also known as Zond 5—which celebrates its 55th anniversary this week. “It has sadly been a tale lost to time, and one that we ought to remember, specifically in the light of the well-earned success of our own Chandrayaan 3 mission,” he says.
Zond 5 was a Soyuz spacecraft bound for the Moon. The brainchild of the former Soviet Union, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), which in the mid-1900s was the undisputed leader in space exploration, Zond 5 was launched on a Soviet Proton UR-500K from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Khazakh SSR (Soviet Socialist Republic; now the independent nation of Kazakhstan) on September 14, 1968. “What was special about it, was that it carried aboard the first terrestrial organisms to the vicinity of the Moon. They were two tortoises, fruit fly eggs, and plants,” shares Chakraverty.
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