I'm John Batchel with my colleague Anatoly Zach, who keeps the Russian space web.

Adventures of the Rus cosmos then and now and in the future.

We're going to then, April of 1975, our heroes, Lazaroff and Mikhanov, nearly blacking out, losing eyesight, coming down with 21G load.

The capsule deploys its parachute, another success of an automatic recovery mission from failure.

Never reached orbit, so they didn't have to necessarily worry about reentry through the heat shield.

But where are they coming down? And they're drifting down, and all of a sudden they hear a thud.

They've landed, and they open the capsule. Now, remember, they took off from Turitam in Kazakhstan,

where Anatoli tells me it was 25 degrees centigrade.

That's warm.

It's sort of on the high end of a good summer day.

And now they open the capsule and climb out.

And what did they find, Anatoly?

Where were they?

So they landed essentially around 1,500 kilometers downrange from Turatam in what Russians called Al-Tai Mountains.

So it's due west from Kazakhstan.

It's actually on a Russian side of the border.

But it's very close to intersection of borders with China and Mongolia.

And what's interesting at that time, the political situation between the Soviet Union and

China was very bad. The relationship between the countries were at the brink of the war.

China was going through cultural revolution, of course.

And so it was, when they realized that the crew actually, they knew that situation

because as soon as they separated from the rockets, they saw that they're coming down in an area

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