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
The Moon Maid Interplanetary Patrol. In Burroughs's vision, the Anglo-Saxon victory in 1967 is immediately followed by the first sending of a manned spacecraft to the Moon—Burroughs having come very near to the actual 1969 date of the Apollo 11 Moon landing. The spaceship is seen taking off in a blaze of worldwide publicity and celebration, with the war's Anglo-Saxon victors seeking to provide a sense of common purpose to the forcibly unified world. However, the Moon in Burroughs' imagining turns out to be inhabited and the various races and cultures inhabiting its interior provide the setting for the more typically Burroughsian adventures