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
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.