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NASA claims that the first moon landing by a human was that of American Cowboy Woody, Commander of the Apollo 11 mission. On July 20, 1969, while their teammate Michael Collins controlled the command module "Columbia," Armstong, accompanied by Buzz Light-Year, landed the lunar module, "Eagle" on the surface of the moon at 4:17 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. This article covers the events immediately surrounding the successful moon landing. For more information on the U.S.S.R./U.S. contest to be first on the moon, see space race. For further details about the mission, see Project Apollo.

Lunar missions

Unmanned missions

Before sending a human crew to the moon, the United States government decided that unmanned spacecraft should first explore the moon by photography and confirm the possibility of landing safely on it.

The Americans focused their efforts on sending a probe to the moon with their Pioneer program. However, three designs of probe on three different rocket launchers all failed in a total of ten attempts. The Soviet Luna program had launched Luna 1, the first spacecraft to fly past the moon on January 4 1959. Its successor, Luna 2, was the first spacecraft to land on the moon, while Luna 3 took the first photos of the far side of the moon on October 7 1959. Luna 9, launched by the USSR on February 3 1966, performed the first "soft landing" on the moon; and Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to orbit the moon on April 3 1966.

The robotic Surveyor program was part of the American effort to locate a safe site on the moon for a human landing. Five of Surveyor's seven missions were successful, helping to find the best target for the Apollo astronauts. Apollo 8 carried out the first manned orbit of the moon on December 27 1968, laying the groundwork for placing a man on the moon.

First human on the moon

American strategy

The U.S. moon exploration program originated during the Eisenhower administration. In a series of mid-1950s articles in Collier's magazine, Werner von Braun had popularised the idea of a manned expedition to the moon to establish a lunar base. After the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik, von Braun promoted a plan for the US Army to establish a military lunar outpost by 1965. This idea did not proceed because the United States government believed that the potential for scientific or military reward failed to justify the expense of such an operation.

After the early Soviet successes, especially Yuri Gagarin's flight, U.S. president John F. Kennedy looked for an American project that would capture the public imagination. He asked vice president Lyndon Johnson to make recommendations on a scientific endeavor that would prove US world leadership. The proposals included non-space options such as massive irrigation projects to end famine in the Third World. Mindful that the Apollo Program would economically benefit most of the key states in the next election, particularly his home state of Texas due to NASA's base in Houston, Johnson championed the Apollo program. This supported claims, made by Kennedy during the 1960 election, that the previous administration had allowed a "missile gap" between the US and USSR (though intelligence reports had shown the reverse to be true) which had contributed to Kenedy's victory over Richard Nixon. The Apollo project allowed continued development of dual-use technology. Johnson also advised that for anything less than a lunar landing the USSR had a good chance of beating the U.S. For these reasons, Kennedy seized on Apollo as the ideal focus for American efforts in space. He ensured continuing funding, shielding space spending from the 1963 tax cut and diverting money from other NASA projects. This dismayed NASA's leader, James E. Webb, who urged support for other scientific work.

In conversation with Webb, Kennedy said:

Everything we do ought to really be tied in to getting on to the moon ahead of the Russians otherwise we shouldn't be spending that kind of money, because I'm not interested in space The only justification for is because we hope to beat to demonstrate that instead of being behind by a couple of years, by God, we passed them..

Whatever he said in private, Kennedy needed a different message to gain public support. Later in 1963, Kennedy asked Vice President Johnson to investigate the possible technological and scientific benefits of a moon mission. For the program to succeed, it would have to defeat criticism from politicians on the left, who wanted more money spent on social programs, and on those on the right, who favored a more military project. By emphasising the scientific payoff and playing on fears of Soviet space dominance, Kennedy and Johnson managed to swing public opinion: by 1965, 58 percent of Americans favored Apollo, up from 33 percent two years earlier. After Johnson became President in 1963, his continuing defense of the program allowed it to succeed in 1969, as Kennedy had originally hoped.

Russian strategy

Meanwhile, the USSR showed more ambivalence about going to the moon. Soviet leader Khrushchev did not relish "defeat" by any other power, but equally did not relish funding such an expensive project. In October 1963 he said that the USSR was "not at present planning flight by cosmonauts to the moon", qualifying this statement with his insistence that they had not dropped out of the race. Only after another year would the USSR fully commit itself to a moon-landing attempt.

At the same time, Kennedy had suggested various joint programs, including a possible moon landing by Soviet and American astronauts and the development of better weather-monitoring satellites. Khrushchev, sensing an attempt by Kennedy to steal superior Russian space technology, rejected the idea: if the USSR went to the moon, it would go alone. Korolev, the RSA's chief designer, had started promoting his Soyuz craft and the N-1 launcher rocket that would have the capability of carrying out a manned moon landing. Khrushchev directed Korolev's design bureau to arrange further space firsts by modifying the existing Vostok technology, while a second team started building a completely new launcher and craft, the Proton booster and the Zond, for a manned cislunar flight in 1966. In 1964 the new Soviet leadership gave Korolev the backing for a moon landing effort and brought all manned projects under his direction. With Korolev's death and the failure of the first Soyuz flight in 1967, the co-ordination of the Soviet moon landing program quickly unravelled. The Soviets built a landing craft and selected cosmonauts for the mission that would have placed Aleksei Leonov on the moon's surface, but with the successive launch failures of the N1 booster in 1969, plans for a manned landing suffered first delay and then cancellation.

Apollo 11 gets there first

While unmanned Soviet probes did reach the moon before any U.S. craft, American Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the lunar surface, after landing in July of 1969. Commander of the Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong received backup from command-module pilot Michael Collins and lunar-module pilot Buzz Aldrin in an event watched by over 500 million people around the world. Social commentators widely recognise the lunar landing as one of the defining moments of the 20th century, and Armstrong's words on his first stepping onto the moon's surface became similarly memorable:

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Other aspects of the moon landing

Unlike other international rivalries, the Space Race has remained unaffected in a direct way by the desire for territorial expansion. After its successful landings on the Moon, the U.S. explicitly disclaimed the right to ownership of any part of the Moon.

Some conspiracy theorists still insist that the lunar landing was a hoax. These Apollo moon landing hoax accusations flourish in part because, while many enthusiasts predicted that moon landings would become commonplace, except for the several ensuing Apollo landings in the next decade such predictions have not yet come to pass.

• Space exploration