Far side of the Moon side visible to Earth. On October 7, 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 3 took the first photographs of the lunar far side, eighteen of them resolvable, covering one-third of the surface invisible from the Earth. The images were analysed, and the first atlas of the far side of the Moon was published by the USSR Academy of Sciences on November 6, 1960. It included a catalog of 500 distinguished features of the landscape. A year later, the first globe (1:13 600 000 scale ) containing lunar features invisible from the Earth was released in the USSR, based on images from
Moon landing conspiracy theories operation manual for the LRV contains some detailed drawings, although not the blueprints. Bart Sibrel cites the relative level of the United States and USSR space technology as evidence that the Moon landings could not have happened. For much of the early stages of the Space Race, the USSR was ahead of the United States, yet in the end, the USSR was never able to fly a manned craft to the Moon, let alone land one on the surface. It is argued that, because the USSR was unable to do this, the United States should have also been unable to