The launch of Artemis 2 on the first of April 2026 had brought the exploration of the moon sharply back into focus after a hiatus of fifty-four years, since the Americans last walked there in 1972. But in 1969, as the United States spacecraft Apollo 11 arrived in lunar orbit and prepared to land the first humans on the surface, another spacecraft was also preparing to land, unbeknownst to most people then or even now. That spacecraft belonged to the Soviet Union, and it was not going to attempt to land humans on the moon. The Soviets, having experienced tremendous technological and financial difficulties with their lunar exploration program, had a different plan.
Their aim was to steal America’s thunder, to land on the moon, grab a shovel full of precious moon rocks and dirt, and head back to Earth, beating the Americans home and giving their scientists a first close-up look at its fascinating cargo. This is the story of the moon rock race between Apollo 11 and a Soviet spacecraft named Luna 15. If you had to bet on which nation would be the first to reach the moon and place humans upon it, the safest bet up until about 1968 would have been the Soviet Union, not the Americans. Indeed, the Soviets had captured most of the important space records prior to the Apollo missions.
The first satellite, Sputnik 1, in 1957. The first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. The first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, in 1963. The first spacewalk, Alexei Leonov, in 1965.
Placing a human on the moon seemed likely to be another Soviet first. In fact, the Soviets had already been first to the moon. The first spacecraft to reach the moon was the Soviet Luna 1 probe on the fourth of January 1959, which went on to orbit the sun. That was followed by the American probe Pioneer 4 on the fourth of March 1959, conducting scientific experiments in orbit around the moon.
Then the Soviets sent Luna 3, which photographed the far side of the moon, a sight never before seen by human eyes. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy made his famous speech, committing the nation to achieving the goal, before the decade was out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. Ranger 1, launched in August 1961, was designed to carry out tests necessary for subsequent lunar missions, but the Ranger program proved to be a disaster.
After Ranger 1, all the missions failed until Ranger 7 was finally able to photograph the lunar surface close-up in July 1964 before it was deliberately impacted into the moon. While NASA struggled to successfully send unmanned probes to orbit the moon, the Soviets were striding ahead and were ready to attempt a soft landing, rather than simply crashing into the lunar surface. A soft landing, of course, could pave the way for an eventual soft landing by human beings, something not lost on the Americans. The first successful soft landing on the moon was made by an unmanned robotic vehicle named Luna 9.
It launched on a Molniya-M rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic on the thirty-first of January 1966, and it remained in contact with Earth until the sixth of February 1966. The Americans were not far behind. On the second of June 1966, Surveyor 1 made a soft landing on the Ocean of Storms, four months after Luna 9. Meanwhile, the Soviet manned moon mission program had scheduled a first lunar landing for September 1968, but after the death of chief Soviet spacecraft designer Korolev in 1966, the Soviet lunar program slipped into delays and financial problems until it was terminated in 1974 after several expensive failures.
It seems incredible to us today, but as Neil Armstrong was piloting the Apollo 11 lunar lander Eagle down to the moon’s surface, the Americans were not alone. The race for the moon rocks was so tight that as Armstrong was making his giant leap for mankind, a Soviet lunar spacecraft was preparing to land hundreds of miles away from the American Eagle lander and beat the Americans back to Earth with its precious geological cargo. The Soviet lunar program was a series of robotic spacecraft, twenty-four of which were built and fifteen sent on missions to the moon between 1959 and 1976, at a cost of around five billion dollars in today’s money. The Soviets managed all of the major firsts except landing a man on the moon.
Luna 2 was the first man-made object to reach the moon, crashing onto its surface in September 1959. Luna 3 orbited the moon that same year, as already mentioned. In February 1966, Luna 9 became the first spacecraft to achieve a soft landing on the moon’s surface, taking the first black and white close-up photographs of the barren landscape. In March 1966, Luna 10 became the first artificial satellite of the moon.
The next stage in the Soviet lunar program was to develop a lander that could collect moon rocks and return them to Earth. The Soviets had almost won the race in June 1969, when Luna 14 launched but failed to achieve Earth orbit after the third stage of its launch vehicle failed to ignite. Soviet hopes now rested entirely on Luna 15. The spacecraft had a mass of twelve and a half thousand pounds, just over five point six tons, and was fitted with a stereo imaging system, a remote arm for sample collection, and a radiation detector.
It was designed to investigate gravitational fields, photograph the moon, and scrape up dirt for analysis. Around a third the size of the Eagle lander, Luna 15 launched atop a Proton K Block D rocket from the Baikonur launch site on the thirteenth of July 1969. Meanwhile, Apollo 11 and its three astronauts lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center atop a massive Saturn V rocket on the sixteenth of July. It was the fifth crewed Apollo mission, but the first to attempt a landing on the moon.
The day after the American launch, Luna 15 arrived in lunar orbit. It looked as though the Soviets would win the race for the rocks. Soviet ground control planned to carry out two orbital corrections to the spacecraft on the eighteenth and nineteenth of July, but the ruggedness of the lunar terrain became a problem soon to be faced by Apollo 11 as well, prompting a delay. Controllers had to spend four days sifting through data to map out a landing plan.
While the Soviets worked to solve the terrain issue, the Americans gained the edge. On the nineteenth of July, while Luna 15 was orbiting the moon, Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit as well, at an altitude of one hundred miles. During orbit, the command module Columbia separated from the last spent rocket stage, turned around, and docked with the Eagle lander. The next day, the twentieth of July, Eagle separated from Columbia and began its descent to the lunar surface, touching down with Neil Armstrong at the controls at twenty-seventeen hours.
The radio crackled with the now famous words as the craft settled onto the Sea of Tranquility: contact light, engine stop, and then, from mission control, we copy you down, Eagle. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. Six and a half hours later, Armstrong, followed by Buzz Aldrin, took his first step on the moon at two-fifty-six on the twenty-first of July 1969.
Mindful of the importance of lunar soil and rocks, Armstrong collected a small sample in a bag in case the mission had to be aborted before further extravehicular activities were planned. It appeared as though the United States had won the race for the rocks, as well as landing the first man on the moon. But the Soviet Union was not out of the race just yet. While Armstrong and Aldrin were walking around on the moon, Luna 15 was being prepped for landing.
The Soviet spacecraft was even captured on film flying over the American Eagle lander. At fifteen-forty-seven hours on the twenty-first of July, Luna 15 fired its main retro rocket engine to initiate its descent to the surface. Four minutes into the descent, transmission suddenly ceased. The spacecraft was at an altitude of one point nine miles, about three kilometers above the moon’s surface, descending out of control at roughly three hundred miles per hour.
It most probably impacted the side of a mountain in the Mare Crisium. Less than two hours after Luna 15 crashed, the Americans departed the lunar surface for home. When Eagle lifted off from the moon at seventeen-fifty-four on the twenty-first of July, Armstrong and Aldrin had collected forty-seven and a half pounds, or twenty-one and a half kilograms, of moon surface material that was worth its weight in gold to scientists back on Earth. So the Americans not only won the race to put a man on the moon, but they also won the race for the rocks.
The Soviet spacecraft lay shattered in the rugged highlands of the Mare Crisium, its precious cargo never collected, its mission a silent failure while the world watched the American triumph unfold. The Apollo 11 crew returned home as heroes, their samples of lunar soil igniting decades of scientific study and reshaping our understanding of the moon’s origins. And as the years passed, the story of Luna 15 faded into obscurity, a footnote to one of humanity’s greatest achievements, a silent testament to a race that had been lost before it was ever truly won.