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
Last Moon of the concept, like his other in "Requiem et Reminiscence" albums, is about the existential questions of humanity. The "Moon Saga" is a symbolic story about the repetition of human sins, war and the question of what is the ultimate meaning of human life. The history of mankind's struggle – the suffering and sorrow in the quest for the virtues and ideas. The tour is titled as "Saigo no Tsuki" ("Last Moon" in English language), but the "saigo" is not written in kanji (last, end) yet which has a nuance of "the final moments" or "dying days", as it is