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
Russia (USSR) vs Rest of the World at first that this would facilitate an unstoppable World team, but on closer inspection, it was not so clear. Russian world champions (and 1984 USSR team survivors) Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov were to be joined by two more exclusive "K" club members—world champions Vladimir Kramnik and Alexander Khalifman. With the further addition of three former champions of Russia (Alexander Morozevich, Peter Svidler and Alexander Motylev) and two more players with Elo ratings in excess of 2700 (Evgeny Bareev and Alexander Grischuk), things were looking decidedly brighter than might have been expected. Indeed, the average Elo ratings of the two