Six flags of soft landers broke a decades-long lunar quiet
Luna 2 first touched the Moon in 1959; Apollo 11 made the first crewed landing in 1969. Six Apollo crews landed between 1969 and December 1972. After Luna 24 in 1976, soft landings paused until China's Chang'e 3 in 2013.
Landing is a braking problem. A craft falling toward the Moon speeds up all the way down; to survive it must either slow to below roughly 160 kilometres per hour and be built to take a jolt, or cancel almost all its speed for a gentle touchdown, the only option with people aboard. An uncontrolled impact usually happens at 70 to 100 percent of lunar escape velocity, which is 2.38 kilometres per second, so a soft lander has to carry a rocket able to shed nearly all of that. Returning adds another rocket, which the landing stage must first haul down, inflating the whole spacecraft.
Early attempts were rough. The Soviet Luna 2 crashed onto the surface deliberately in 1959, and the United States matched it with Ranger 4 in 1962, though all three American tries that year to set down a rugged seismometer package failed. In 1966 Luna 9 and Luna 13 made the first soft landings and sent back the first pictures from the ground, and five American Surveyors followed. Apollo later crashed spent Saturn V stages and Lunar Module ascent stages into the Moon on purpose so seismometers left by astronauts could record the shocks.
Twelve astronauts walked there over 41 months. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out first on 20 July 1969, and Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17 left last on 14 December 1972, Cernan being the final one off; on every mission a third crewman waited in orbit. China's Chang'e programme has since landed four times, returning soil and in 2019 touching down on the far side.
The recent rush has been mixed. India's Chandrayaan-3 set its Vikram lander and Pragyan rover down near the south pole on 23 August 2023, and Japan's SLIM landed on 19 January 2024, while SpaceIL's Beresheet in 2019 and ispace's Hakuto-R in 2023 failed. Intuitive Machines' Odysseus landed in February 2024 but broke a strut and tipped over, and in March 2025 Firefly's Blue Ghost became the first fully successful commercial lander, working for 14 days.
Source: Moon landing
