NOTE: most of that post is NOT MINE.
It is taken from a book :
Soviet and Russian Lunar Exploration by Brian Harvey (2007)
I prefer telling it from the start - no question of plagiarism.
Harvey description of a manned Zond mission was just superb. I really needed to integrate it in my TL.
December 9, 1968
"The Proton rocket had been fuelled up about eight hours before liftoff.
The crew - Alexei Leonov and Oleg Makarov – had gone aboard 2.5 hours before liftoff. Dressed in light grey coveralls and communication soft hats, standing at the bottom of the lift that would bring them up to the cabin, they had offered some words of encourage-ment to the launch crews overseeing the mission.
The payload went on internal power from two hours before liftoff.
The pad area is then evacuated and the tower rolled back to 200 m distant, leaving the rocket standing completely free. There may be a wisp of oxidizer blowing off the top stage, but otherwise the scene is eerily silent, for these are storable fuels.
The launch command goes in at 10 sec and the fuels start to mix with the nitric acid. This is an explosive combination, so the engines start to fire at once, making a dull thud. As they do so, orange-brown smoke begins to rush out of the flame trench, the Proton sitting there amidst two powerful currents of vapour pouring out from either side.
As the smoke billows out, Proton is airborne, with debris and stones from the launch area flying out in all directions.
Twelve seconds into the mission, Proton rolls over in its climb to point in the right direction.
A minute into the mission Proton goes through the sound barrier.
Vibration is now at its greatest, as are the G forces, 4 G.
The second-stage engines begin to light at 120 sec, just as the first-stage engines are completing their burn. Proton is now 50 km high, the first stage falls away and there is an onion ring wisp of cloud as the new stage takes over. Proton is now lost to sight and those lucky enough to see the launch go back indoors to keep warm.
Then, 334 sec into the mission, small thrusters fire the second stage downward so that the third stage can begin its work. It completes its work at 584 sec and the rocket is now in orbit.
Once in orbit, the precise angle for translunar injection is recalculated by the instrumentation system on block D. The engine of block D is fired 80 min later over the Atlantic Ocean as it passes over a Soviet tracking ship.
The cosmonauts experienced relatively gentle G forces, but in no time they soared high above Earth, seeing our planet and its blues and whites in a way that could never be imagined from the relative safety of low-Earth orbit.
At this stage, with Zond safely on its way to the moon, Moscow Radio and Television announced the launching. Televised pictures were transmitted of the two cosmonauts in the cabin and they pointed their handheld camera out of the porthole to see the round Earth diminish in the distance. The spaceship was not called Zond but Akademik Sergei Korolev, dedicating the mission to the memory of the great designer.
Day 2 of the mission was dominated by the mid-course correction, done automatically, but the cosmonauts checked that the system appeared to be working properly. Although the Earth was ever more receding into the distance, the cosmonauts saw little of the moon as they approached, only the thin sliver of its western edge. Korolev's dish would be pointed at Earth for most of the mission in any case.
At the end of day 3 Korolev fell into the gravity well of the moon, gradually picking up speed as it approached the swing-by, although this was little evident in the cabin itself.
Then, at the appointed moment, Zond dipped under the southwestern limb of the moon. At that very moment, the communications link with ground control in Yevpatoria were lost, blocked by the moon.
The spaceship was silent now, apart from the hum of the airconditioning. For the next 45 min, the entire face of the moon's farside filled their portholes, passing by only 1,200 km below. The commander kept a firm lock on the moon, while the flight engineer taking pictures of the farside peaks, jumbled highlands and craters, for the farside of the moon has few seas or mare. As they soared around the farside, the cosmonauts were conscious of coming around the limb of the moon.
The black of the sky filled their view above as the moon receded below. As they rounded the moon, they had seen a nearly full round Earth coming over the horizon.
The Akademik Sergei Korolev would reestablish radio contact with Yevpatoria. This was one of the great moments of the mission, for the cosmonauts would now describe everything that they saw below and presently behind them and as soon as possible beam down television as well as radio. Their excited comments were later replayed time and time again.
A mid-course correction would be the main feature at the end of day 4. The atmosphere was relaxed, after the excitement of the previous day, but in the background was the awareness that the most dangerous manoeuvre of the mission lay ahead. The course home was checked time and time again, with a final adjust-ment made 90,000 km out, done by the crew if the automatic system failed. The southern hemisphere grew and grew in Korolev's window. Contact with the ground stations in Russia was lost, though attempts were made to retain communications through ships at sea.
The two cosmonauts soon perceived Korolev to be picking up speed. Strapping themselves in their cabin, they dropped the service module and their own high-gain antenna and then tilt the heat-shield of their acorn-shaped cabin at the correct angle in the direction of flight.
This was a manoeuvre they had practised a hundred times or more. Now they felt the gravity forces again, for the first time in six days, as Zond burrowed into the atmosphere.
After a little while, they sensed the cushion of air building under Zond and the spacecraft rose again. The G loads lightened and weightlessness briefly returned as the cabin swung around half the world in darkness on its long, fast, skimming trajectory. Then the G forces returned as Korolev dived in a second occasion. This time the G forces grew and grew and the cabin began to glow outside the window as it went through the flames of reentry, 'like being on the inside of a blowtorch' as Nikolai Rukhavishnikov later described reentry.
Eventually, after all the bumps, there was a thump as the parachute came out, a heave upward as the canopy caught the air and a gentle, swinging descent. As the cabin reached the flat steppe of Kazakhstan, retrorockets fired for a second underneath to cushion the landing. On some landings the cabin comes down upright, on others it would roll over.
Hopefully, the helicopter ground crews were soon on hand to pull the cosmonauts out. The charred, still hot Akademik Sergei Korolev was to be examined, inspected, checked and brought to a suitable, prominent place of reverence in a museum to be admired for all eternity."
(end of Harvey description)
Stop daydreaming, Alexey– Leonov told himself.
He tried to concentrate on the letter he would send to the Soviet leadership, a letter that would decide, or not, if he would be the first man around the Moon, ahead of the Apollo 8 crew.
As luck would have it, the same launch window that might take Apollo 8 to the moon opened for America on 21st December but much earlier in the USSR - from 7th to 9th December. This was entirely due to the celestial mechanics of the optimum launching and landing opportunities.
Leonov wrote (to no avail, unfortunately, as future would prove it)
"I and Makarov are prepared, regardless of Zond 6's problems, to take the risk and ride their own Zond for seven days to the Moon and back. So is our backup crew, Valeri Bykovsky and Nikolai Rukavishnikov"
