This is CBS Eye on the World with John Batchelor. Here's John Batchelor.

It is a late winter, 1968.

Ross Cosmos, Bikinard Cosmodrome, the launch of a vehicle called Zond4.

Zon 4, 2 March, 1968.

The idea was to prep a moon landing.

I welcome Bob Zimmerman.

He's the author of Genesis, The Story of Apollo 8, First Man Flight, to Another World.

Bob, a very good evening to you.

Ross Cosmos, the Soviet program, and NASA, the American program, were in a moon race.

At this point, both had recovered from catastrophes, and they were preparing for their march to moon landing.

What was Zon for? What was the zon series that so

fascinated worried and made nassar hurry up its plans good evening to you bob good

evening john uh it was a moon race it was actually it was a neck and neck moon race in

many ways uh uh what the russian so Russian Soviets were doing was they had gotten into orbit and successfully

started to use manned, their Soyuz capsule, the very first iteration of it.

And what they did with the Zandt program was they revised it so that it would be sent on a succumb lunar mission

around the moon and back to Earth.

It would not go into orbit around the Moon, but it would circle around, it would zoom around the Moon,

and the Moon's gravity would slingshot it back to Earth, and then it would come back to Earth,

and then it would hit the to Earth, and then it would

hit the atmosphere, bounce off the atmosphere, and come down and land safely.

And the idea was to put two astronauts on this and get to around the moon before we could get to the moon.

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