A small timeline clarification, Korolev died on January 14th, 1966. He did not live to see this successful flight. The Zond mission series is notable because i

A small timeline clarification, Korolev died on January 14th, 1966. He did not live to see this successful flight. The Zond mission series is notable because it's the first time the Soviets tried an electronic digital computer on their spacecraft. > In August 1964, trying to catch up with the Apollo program, the Soviet Union launched its own lunar landing project. A new spacecraft code named 7K-L1 (later publicly named Zond) was designed, and its control system included, for the first time in a Soviet spacecraft, an onboard electronic digital computer, the Argon-11S. The design and construction of the Argon-11S was completed in 1968 by the Scientific Research Institute of Electronic Machinery (NIEM) in Moscow. - http://web.mit.edu/slava/space/introduction.htm http://web.mit.edu/slava/space/introduction.htm As they didn't have the ability to produce integrated circuits, they used something called a "hybrid IC" that is kinda like a shrink-wrapped PCB with extra steps,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_integrated_circuit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_integrated_circuit These missions were also responsible for other firsts, like the first test of a Pulsed Plasma Thruster. And the Zond 2 & 3 were the first Solar-Electric Propulsion missions ever flown in space, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsed_plasma_thruster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulsed_plasma_thruster