January: Luna 1 launches from the Soviet Union ... Spacecraft Center (which later will be renamed Johnson Space Center): "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things ...

The Space Race was a battle in the Cold War ... Unmanned probes were launched at the moon in 1958. By 1959, Luna 2 crash-landed on the moon — the first man-made object on the lunar surface ...

TASS/. The successful launch of the Russian automatic probe Luna-25 to the Moon has heated up the space race to reach the valuable resources of the Earth's natural satellite, which is afoot ...