Reaching the Moon: The History of the NASA Programs that Led to the Successful Apollo Missions

Today the Space Race is widely viewed poignantly and fondly as a race to the Moon that culminated with Apollo 11 “winning” the Race for the United States. In fact, it encompassed a much broader range of competition between the Soviet Union and the United States that affected everything from military technology to successfully launching satellites that could land on Mars or orbit other planets in the Solar System. Moreover, the notion that America “won” the Space Race at the end of the 1960s overlooks just how competitive the Space Race actually was in launching people into orbit, as well as the major contributions the Space Race influenced in leading to today’s International Space Station and continued space exploration.

The Apollo Program is the most famous and celebrated in American history, but the first successful landing of men on the Moon during Apollo 11 had complicated roots dating back over a decade, and it also involved one of NASA’s most infamous tragedies. From 1959-1963, the United States worked toward putting satellites and humans into orbit via the Mercury program, but Eisenhower’s administration was already designing plans for the Apollo program by 1960, a year before the first Russian orbited the Earth and two years before John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.

At the same time, America would begin missions to the Moon as early as 1958. On March 27, 1958, Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy announced a lunar project for the International Geophysical Year, consisting of three Air Force launches followed by two Army launches of a JPL-designed lunar probe. ARPA directed the Air Force to launch its probes "as soon as possible consistent with the requirement that a minimal amount of useful data concerning the Moon be obtained."

Throughout the 1960s, NASA would spend tens of billions on missions to the Moon, the most expensive peacetime program in American history to that point, and Apollo was only made possible by the tests conducted through earlier missions, including the historic Ranger Program. Conceived as an early part of the attempt to land a man on the Moon, Ranger was designed to photograph the lunar surface in preparation for future landings. Until Ranger, images of the Moon were only available through Earth-based telescopes, which lacked the detail necessary to determine safe sites for landing a spacecraft. Ranger aimed to fill in that gap of knowledge, and like many of NASA’s missions during the 1960s, the program exemplified both the successes and the failures of the agency’s early years. Nonetheless, the Ranger Program would set important precedents by taking the first close-up photos of the Moon and landing the first American spacecraft on the lunar surface.

Subsequently, between May 1966 and January 1968, the Surveyor Program launched seven unmanned spacecraft to the lunar surface to gather data and test the feasibility of landing a manned vehicle on the Moon. Although largely forgotten now, without these missions the later series of manned Moon landings would not have been possible, and there is no question most Americans felt the costs were worth it as they watched the first live shots of astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the Moon. As he left his first footprint on the Moon, Armstrong transmitted one of the 20th century’s most famous phrases: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”