Moon by the Soviet Union's Luna 2, an unmanned spacecraft. The United States' NASA Apollo program achieved the only manned lunar missions to date, beginning with the first manned orbital mission by Apollo 8 in 1968, and six manned landings between 1969 and 1972, with the first being Apollo 11. These missions returned lunar rocks which have been used to develop a geological understanding of the Moon's origin, internal structure, and the Moon's later history. Since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the Moon has been visited only by unmanned spacecraft. Both the Moon's natural prominence in the earthly sky and
From the Earth to the Moon First Men in the Moon") inspired the first science fiction film, "A Trip to the Moon", made in 1902 by Georges Méliès. In 1958, another film adaptation of this story was released, titled "From the Earth to the Moon". It was one of the last films made under the RKO Pictures banner. The story also became the basis for the very loose adaptation "Jules Verne's Rocket to the Moon" (1967), a caper-style British comedy starring Burl Ives and Terry-Thomas. The 1961 Czechoslovak film "The Fabulous Baron Munchausen" combines characters and plot elements from the Verne novel with those of the