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
Manfred Memorial Moon Mission flyby in a recovery attempt after a partially failed launch that left it on an unusable highly elliptical orbit. Using gravity assist manoeuvres, the satellite was successfully recovered on 17 June. Unlike the 4M mission, the HGS-1 was not designed as a lunar mission, and made a flyby only in a recovery attempt, however according to Hughes Global Services, the satellite operator at the time, it claimed the title of the first commercial mission to the Moon. The first commercial payload to the "surface" of the Moon was by Celestis, that paid for commercial transportation of a human remains memorial