Exploration of the Moon and indeed of human history in general. The first man-made object to reach the Moon was the unmanned Soviet probe Luna 2, which made a hard landing on September 14, 1959, at 21:02:24 Z. The far side of the Moon was first photographed on October 7, 1959, by the Soviet probe Luna 3. Though vague by today's standards, the photos showed that the far side of the Moon almost completely lacked maria. In an effort to compete with these Soviet successes, U.S. President John F. Kennedy proposed the national goal of landing a human on the Moon. Speaking to a
Luna 15 in Mare Crisium. An audio recording of the minutes in which British technicians at the radio telescope facility in Jodrell Bank observed Luna 15's descent was first made available to the public on 3 July 2009. In a race to reach the Moon and return to Earth, the parallel missions of Luna 15 and Apollo 11 represented, in many ways, the culmination of the Space Race between the space programs of both the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s. The simultaneous missions became one of the first instances of Soviet–American space cooperation: the Soviet Union released Luna