Exploration of the Moon by Soviet Spacecraft

Abstract

Launches of Soviet spacecraft to the Moon started on 2 January 1959, only 15 months after the launch of the first Sputnik. The full list of missions to the Moon is given. It includes all officially declared Soviet lunar missions. According to some sources there were also several failed Soviet attempts to send spacecraft to the Moon, when for various reasons, spacecraft stayed in Earth orbit or failed even earlier. They have never been officially recognized by the Soviet Union as lunar missions, and this is why they are not mentioned here. In total, there were 29 Soviet missions to the Moon. Of them, 20 were successful, one was partly successful, and eight missions failed. Twenty‐four missions were named Luna (the Moon, in Russian); five missions were named Zond (probe, in Russian). All Soviet missions to the Moon were robotic, although there was a program of Soviet manned flights to the Moon, which was canceled in the late 1960s because of failures of the heavy booster rocket necessary for those flights. It is necessary to mention that in the 1960s–1970s, when the Soviet Union sent spacecraft to the Moon, the space activity of both the Soviet Union and the United States was strongly politically motivated. The Soviet Union, by sending numerous lunar missions, wanted to demonstrate the superiority of its political system. The Apollo mission to the Moon, the backbone of the U.S. space program of that time, was a response to the challenge of Soviet space activity. This article gives details on the various Soviet missions and there findings.