Moon landing the first Soyuz flight in 1967, the co-ordination of the Soviet Moon landing program quickly unraveled. The Soviets built a landing craft and selected cosmonauts for the mission that would have placed Aleksei Leonov on the Moon's surface, but with the successive launch failures of the N1 booster in 1969, plans for a manned landing suffered first delay and then cancellation. A program of automated return vehicles was begun, in the hope of being the first to return lunar rocks. This had several failures. It eventually succeeded with Luna 16. But this had little impact, because the Apollo 11 and
Colonization of the Moon Constellation program). On June 18, 2009, NASA's LCROSS/LRO mission to the moon was launched. The LCROSS mission was designed to acquire research information to assist with future lunar exploratory missions and was scheduled to conclude with a controlled collision of the craft on the lunar surface. LCROSS's mission concluded as scheduled with its controlled impact on October 9, 2009. In 2010, due to reduced congressional NASA appropriations, President Barack Obama halted the Bush administration's earlier lunar exploration initiative and directed a generic focus on crewed missions to asteroids and Mars, as well as extending support for the International Space Station.