For our continuing “this day in space history” series, today marks the 40th anniversary of the Russian’s Zond-6 mission to the moon. It successfully flew by the moon as planned, but a reentry problem apparently caused most of its photographic film to be lost. You can read about it on this NASA page or this Wikipedia page. I’m not sure what to make of the notation that France sponsored the mission, but I was very interested to see that Zond-6 launched on a Proton rocket out of Tyuratam: the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Why did that fact interest me? Because I watched the Nimiq-2 satellite and its Proton booster get prepped for launch at the Baikonur Cosmodrome back in November-December 2002. (I came home shortly before the launch.) While I was there I was inspired to write the first draft of my short story, “The Rocket Seamstress.”
In other writing and lunar-related news, yesterday I passed the 80,000-word mark on my novel, MARE NUBIUM. I’m beginning to doubt that I’ll hit 100K by December, but I’m trying to forge ahead.
by 
