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The Ranger missions were daring one-offs, with spacecraft engineered to streak toward the moon and capture as many images as possible before crashing onto its surface.
In , the Soviet spacecraft Luna 9 became the first vehicle to land safely on the lunar surface. Stocked with scientific and communications equipment, the small spacecraft photographed a ground-level lunar panorama. Later that year, Luna 10 launched, becoming the first spacecraft to successfully orbit the moon.
Over the two years that followed, NASA launched five Lunar Orbiter missions that were designed to circle the moon and chart its surface in preparation for the ultimate goal: landing astronauts on the surface.
These orbiters photographed about 99 percent of the moon's surface, revealing potential landing sites and paving the way for a giant leap forward in space exploration. See a map of all lunar landings. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a person on the moon before the decade was complete. The Apollo program , by far the most expensive spaceflight endeavor in history , kicked off that year, and by the time it ended in , nine missions and 24 astronauts had orbited or landed on the moon.
Perhaps the most famous of those, Apollo 11 , marked the first time humans had stepped on another world. Exploring the legacy of Apollo 11 at the dawn of a new era of space travel. Each mission after Apollo 11 set new milestones in space travel and lunar exploration. Four months after the first humans reached the moon, Apollo 12 touched down, achieving a much more precise landing on the moon. Apollo 13 narrowly avoided a near-disaster when on-board oxygen tanks exploded in April , forcing the crew to abort a planned moon landing.
All three survived. During the third lunar landing, in January , Apollo 14 , commander Alan Shepard set a new record for the farthest distance traveled on the moon: 9, feet. He even lobbed a few golf balls into a nearby crater with a makeshift 6-iron. Apollo 15 , launched in July , was the first of three missions capable of a longer stay on the moon.
In the course of three days spent on the lunar surface, achievements included collecting hundreds of pounds of lunar samples and traveling more than 17 miles in the first piloted moon buggy. The Soviet Union had sent a remotely controlled rover to the moon , Lunokhod 1, in See a timeline of the space race and its modern-day version in private spaceflight. Later Artemis missions will establish a longer-term lunar presence. But recently, we found that a moon landing in would be difficult to achieve.
Before NASA can return to the moon, it must complete two test flights: an uncrewed flight currently planned for later this year, and a flight with crew planned for The test flights will demonstrate that the Space Launch System launch vehicle, Orion crew capsule, and associated ground systems have the initial capabilities needed for future Artemis missions. After the programs are integrated, Artemis I and II must successfully occur—and any issues discovered during them must be resolved—before NASA can have confidence in the abilities needed to return astronauts to the lunar surface.
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