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
USSR-1 At about 06:00 Moscow time the envelope was filled with 3 thousand cubic meters of hydrogen, or 1/8 of the balloon's geometric capacity. At stratospheric altitudes this amount would have expanded to fill the whole envelope. Prokofiev reported status to Air Forces chief Jēkabs Alksnis around 8:00. "USSR-1" with Prokofiev, Godunov and radio operator Ernst Birnbaum on board lifted off at 8:40 Moscow Time and established radio contact with ground five minutes later. According to Prokofiev's flight log, at 9:17 am "USSR-1" passed 16,800 meter mark, beating Piccard's record; between 9:19 and 9:26 the aircraft, fully expanded, levelled in a