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
Moon landing that the US had an even chance of beating the USSR to a manned lunar landing, but not for anything less. Kennedy seized on Apollo as the ideal focus for efforts in space. He ensured continuing funding, shielding space spending from the 1963 tax cut, but diverting money from other NASA scientific projects. This last dismayed NASA's leader, James E. Webb, who perceived the need for NASA's support from the scientific community. The Moon landing required development of the large Saturn V launch vehicle, which achieved a perfect record of zero catastrophic failures or launch vehicle-caused mission failures, in thirteen