Zond 5 splashed down in the Indian Ocean yesterday after flying around the Moon and returning. The spacecraft carried turtles, worm eggs, plants, bacteria, seeds, and other biological specimens. The turtles survived. They lost some weight, apparently, but they’re alive.

Turtles flew around the Moon and came back alive. I keep repeating that to myself.

The Soviets have demonstrated they can send a capsule on a free-return trajectory — the kind that Apollo will use, swinging around the Moon and coming back to Earth without a powered lunar orbit insertion. The spacecraft was unmanned but the biology aboard confirms that living things can survive the radiation and acceleration and weightlessness of such a flight.

There was also voice radio traffic picked up by ham radio operators during Zond 5’s flight that was reported to sound like human speech. The Soviets denied cosmonauts were aboard; Western intelligence analysis was uncertain. I’ll go with the official report — unmanned — while acknowledging that we don’t always get the true story from Moscow about what’s aboard their spacecraft.

Here’s the state of the race as I understand it: Apollo 7 is scheduled for October, the first crewed Apollo mission. If that goes well, NASA has to decide whether Apollo 8 goes to the Moon or stays in Earth orbit. The pressure to go to the Moon first is now considerable.

Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders have been training for Apollo 8. They knew for months it might be a lunar orbit mission. The decision reportedly isn’t final yet — it depends on Apollo 7’s success. But from the outside, it seems like NASA is going to go for it.

Borman, Lovell, and Anders going around the Moon in December.

The year 1968 — the year America nearly broke, the year King and Kennedy died, the year the war got more confusing — might end with American astronauts seeing the Moon up close for the first time in human history.

I barely dare to think it. I’m going to think it anyway.