Cold War (1953–1962) human on the moon. The first of the Lunar missions was Luna 1, which launched on January 2, 1959. Its successful mission established the first rocket engine restart within Earth orbit and the first man-made object to establish heliocentric orbit. Luna 2, which launched on September 14, 1959, established the first impact into another celestial body (the moon). Finally, Luna 3 launched on October 7, 1959 and took the first pictures of the dark side of the moon. After these three missions in 1953, the Soviets continued their exploration of the moon and its environment in 21 other Luna missions.
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