Just as the Space Race was approaching the finish line in November 1968, the Soviet Union launched Zond 6: an unmanned spacecraft with a mission to loop around the moon and return safely to Earth. The voyage was planned as a precursor to a crewed flight, in hopes of beating the United States launch of Apollo 8 scheduled for December of that same year.

At what is now the Jodrell Bank Observatory, part of the U.K.’s University of Manchester, astronomers tracked both American and Russian spacecraft. Spacecraft signals picked up by the observatory’s Lovell Telescope were preserved as audio recordings, which are receiving new attention half a century later.

Sir Bernard Lovell tracking spacecraft with a tape recorder at Jodrell Bank. Souce: Jodrell Bank Observatory/The Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysic at The University of Manchester

Tim O’Brien, an astrophysics professor and associate director of the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, has been exploring the observatory archive in preparation for a major new exhibition in early 2021.

"I'd read about these voices but I'd never actually heard a recording or seen a transcript,” O’Brien said. He asked a colleague, Sir Kostya Novoselov, to translate a voice on one of the recordings speaking in Russian. Novoselov shared the Nobel Prize in 2010 for his work on graphene. “Touching this great piece of history is thrilling,” Novoselov said. “You almost travel back in time to the era of great space exploration."

The newly released audio file begins with beeps of the telemetry being received by the spacecraft. Next comes the voice of Sir Bernard Lovell, the observatory's first director for whom the Lovell telescope is named. "This is Zond 6," Lovell says in the clip. "This is the Russian probe Zond 6. November the fourteenth 1968. The time is 01:52 UT. The probe is about one hour's travel away from the moon."

Although Zond 6 made it around the moon, reaching its closest approach of 2,420 km, it depressurized and crash-landed during its return. A crewed flight was delayed, and the U.S. scored a major Space Race victory when Apollo 8 met its planned schedule and became the first piloted circumlunar mission in history.