<P> After the unsuccessful attempt by the Luna 1 to land on the moon in 1959, the Soviet Union performed the first hard (unpowered) moon landing later that same year with the Luna 2 spacecraft, a feat the U.S. duplicated in 1962 with Ranger 4 . Since then, twelve Soviet and U.S. spacecraft have used braking rockets to make soft landings and perform scientific operations on the lunar surface, between 1966 and 1976 . In 1966 the USSR accomplished the first soft landings and took the first pictures from the lunar surface during the Luna 9 and Luna 13 missions . The U.S. followed with five unmanned Surveyor soft landings . </P> <P> The Soviet Union achieved the first unmanned lunar soil sample return with the Luna 16 probe on 24 September 1970 . This was followed by Luna 20 and Luna 24 in 1972 and 1976, respectively . Following the failure at launch in 1969 of the first Lunokhod, Luna E-8 No. 201, the Luna 17 and Luna 21 were successful unmanned lunar rover missions in 1970 and 1973 . </P> <P> Many missions were failures at launch . In addition, several unmanned landing missions achieved the Lunar surface but were unsuccessful, including: Luna 15, Luna 18, and Luna 23 all crashed on landing; and the U.S. Surveyor 4 lost all radio contact only moments before its landing . </P> <P> More recently, other nations have crashed spacecraft on the surface of the Moon at speeds of around 8,000 kilometres per hour (5,000 mph), often at precise, planned locations . These have generally been end - of - life lunar orbiters that, because of system degradations, could no longer overcome perturbations from lunar mass concentrations ("masscons") to maintain their orbit . Japan's lunar orbiter Hiten impacted the Moon's surface on 10 April 1993 . The European Space Agency performed a controlled crash impact with their orbiter SMART - 1 on 3 September 2006 . </P>

When was the last time we went to space