Moon landing the only country to have successfully conducted manned missions to the Moon, with the last departing the lunar surface in December 1972. After the unsuccessful attempt by the Luna 1 to land on the Moon in 1959, the Soviet Union performed the first hard (unpowered) Moon landing later that same year with the Luna 2 spacecraft, a feat the U.S. duplicated in 1962 with Ranger 4. Since then, twelve Soviet and U.S. spacecraft have used braking rockets to make soft landings and perform scientific operations on the lunar surface, between 1966 and 1976. In 1966 the USSR accomplished the first
Lost Moon Lost Moon Lost Moon: The Perilous Voyage of Apollo 13 (published in paperback as Apollo 13), is a non-fiction book first published in 1994 by astronaut James Lovell and journalist Jeffrey Kluger, about the failed April 1970 Apollo 13 lunar landing mission which Lovell commanded. The book is the basis of the 1995 film adaptation "Apollo 13", directed by Ron Howard. Apollo 13 was the third mission of the Apollo program intended to land men on the Moon. An explosion of an onboard liquid oxygen tank in the Service Module, when the craft was close to reaching the Moon, crippled