[FPSPACE] More on Zond 4...

[Peter Pesavento]

I would like to respectfully disagree with Saunders Kramer....and Ed Cameron....

The information is already out there....

Zond 4 did re-enter....it didn't stay in orbit for years on end...and cosmo's did communicate via a relay on board the spacecraft back to receiving stations on Earth...

These too were covered in my New Scientist article back in 1993 (with the at-the-time new Russian Disclosures)....and there is also information contained in the article about the exact cause of the problem....however, further released details might have superceded the "bare essentials" in my article since that time...but however:

"According to space historians Sergei Shamsutdinov and I. Marinin from Videokosmos, a spaceflight information centre in Moscow,......Pavel Popovich and Vitaliy Sevastyanov were engaged in a flight simulation experiment. During the course of the mission, both cosmonauts stayed in a specially isolated bunker and communicated with Yevpatoryia Flight Control Centre in the Ukraine via a relay on board the spacecraft.....When Zond 4 returned to Earth, the re-entry module failed to separate from the service module before entering the Earth's atmosphere, resulting in an unplanned descent. Learning that the landing site would be nowhere near central Asia, ground personnel activated the self-destruct system and fragments of the spacecraft eventually fell into the Gulf of Guniea...." etc. etc.

Now one may want to argue what "eventually" means time-scale wise....I don't have the answer to that...
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