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 problem of surviving the incredible acceleration that the explosion would cause. Ardan suggests that Barbicane and Nicholl travel with him in the projectile, and the offer is accepted. In the end, the projectile is successfully launched, but the destinies of the three astronauts are left inconclusive. The sequel, "Around the Moon", deals with what happens to the three men in their travel from the earth to the moon. The novel was adapted as the opera "Le voyage dans la lune" in 1875, with music by Jacques Offenbach. In 1880 the Pall Mall Gazette described Verne’s "Columbiad" as a ‘space-ship’ -