The most spectacular act of trolling in the history of space travel
We’d all like to believe that space travel is the product of the world’s great minds of science coming together in harmony to literally raise us up to bold new heights – sadly, that’s not the case.
To this day, we live in the shadow of the space race of the 1950s and 1960s, this was a time when the eyes of the entire world seemed to be glued to the stars, filled with wonder at what lay beyond the final frontier, which may have been the case for most people, but ironically enough, the only people not looking up were the very people in charge of those missions to space – they were absolutely not looking up. Instead, they were looking across the Atlantic.
It’s true, the space race was pretty much the same thing that every bloody thing was in the mid-20th century – a bloody proxy war between the Russians and the Americans about their bloody political philosophies, an argument with the fate of the world at stake about whether communism or capitalism was better.
History may be written by the winners, and American capitalism very much likes to think that it won the Cold War, yet for most of the 1960s, the Space Race was very much the Communists’ to lose – the Russians sent the first satellite into orbit in 1957, the first animal into space, Laika the dog, into orbit that same year, Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space, and in 1961, they sent the first woman into space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963.
Hell, with Zond 5 in 1968, they sent up two tortoises to orbit the moon before America had achieved that with humans, the USSR were miles ahead in the race to the moon, so they decided to have a little un-Russian fun with their opponents with the Zond 5 probe.
How did the Russians troll the US in space?
Zond 5 was part of the Russian probe program. The Soviets wanted to examine the effect that cosmic radiation had on living things, so alongside the two tortoises was a veritable greenhouse of companions. There were fruit fly eggs along with carrots, wheat, barley, pine and many more – the one organism that wasn’t on the probe was a human being, but during the launch, Korolyov realised that the Americans wouldn’t necessarily know that.
So, on September 19th, 1968, NASA intercepted a transmission that seemed like a genuine nightmare – the Jodrell Bank observatory and the CIA found that the voices of the cosmonauts Valery Bykovsky, Vitaly Sevastyanov and Pavel Popovich were emanating from the Zond 5 probe, reading out telemetry data and discussing whether they should make an attempt to land… The absolute doomsday scenario of the space race: Russia was about to land on the moon.
Except they weren’t. It was a joke pulled by Popovich, and, ironically, it was one pulled because, despite all their firsts, the Soviet Space Program had realised a few weeks before launch that they would never make it to the moon before the Americans. Thus, Popovich decided to give them one last big scare before they achieved victory the following year. One which reportedly caused an outraged President Johnson to call his Space advisor Frank Borman and ask, “Why is Popovich reporting from the moon?!”
A funny story, but one that does remind us all that this whole Space Race was a dick-measuring contest – at least sometimes they can be funny.