Surveyor 1 made America's first soft Moon landing
On this day · 2 June 1966
NASA's first robotic lander touched down gently on the Moon and beamed home thousands of images that paved the way for Apollo.
On June 2, 1966, NASA’s Surveyor 1 settled gently onto the Ocean of Storms, becoming the first American spacecraft to make a soft landing on another world. It succeeded on its very first attempt, touching down just 63.6 hours after launch from Cape Canaveral and only about 9 miles from its target.
Unlike the crashes engineers feared, the three-legged craft survived intact and went straight to work, transmitting a flood of close-up pictures of the lunar surface.
Surveyor 1 returned 11,240 high-resolution images before contact ended in early 1967.
The data answered an urgent question for the Apollo program: would the Moon’s surface bear the weight of a lander and astronauts? Surveyor 1 showed that it would. The mission, a complete success, helped clear the path for Apollo 11’s crewed landing three years later.
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