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
Moon River (radio program) Virginio Marucci, Byron sketched out some notes, including his original poem that opened the show. At one point, Marucci began playing Fritz Kreisler's "Caprice Viennois," a piece which Byron's poem brought to mind. Both the poem and the musical piece would open the program for its entire forty-two-year history. A show with a loyal following over the years, "Moon River" was canceled by WLW in 1953 in an effort to modernize the schedule, but revived the next summer due to continued listener outcry. In the decade after the program's final broadcast in 1970, a series of Moon River concerts were