Although the Soviets beat the U.S. to the start of the space program, no Soviet cosmonaut landed on the moon.
List of manned moon landings
Apollo 11 - July 16, 1969. First manned landing on the Moon, July 20.
Apollo 12 - November 14, 1969. First precise manned landing on the Moon.
Apollo 14 - January 31, 1971. Alan Shepard, the sole astronaut of the original Mercury Seven astronauts to land on the Moon, walks (and golfs) on the Moon.
Apollo 15 - July 26, 1971. First mission with the Lunar Rover vehicle.
Apollo 16 - April 16, 1972. First landing in the lunar highlands.
Apollo 17 - December 7, 1972. Final Apollo lunar mission, first night launch, only mission with a professional geologist.
Soviet strategy
Meanwhile, the USSR showed more ambivalence about going to the moon. Soviet leader Nikita 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 that 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, which ultimately failed.
Soviet Soyuz rockets like the one pictured above became the first reliable means to transport objects into Earth orbit.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 Russian space technology, rejected the idea: if the USSR went to the moon, it would go alone. Korolyov, 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 Korolyov'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 Korolyov the backing for a moon landing effort and brought all manned projects under his direction. With Korolyov'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.
THE SOVIET MANNED LUNAR PROGRAM
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