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A Moon landing is the arrival of a crewed or robotic spacecraft on the Moon’s surface; soft landings are damage-minimizing and are the only practical option for humans.
A Moon (lunar) landing is defined as the arrival of a spacecraft—crewed or robotic—on the Moon’s surface. The first human-made object to touch the Moon was Luna 2 in 1959, and the first crewed landing was Apollo 11 in 1969. Between 1969 and 1972, six crewed landings were carried out by the Apollo program; after Apollo ended in December 1972, no soft landings occurred until Chang’e 3 in 2013. Soft landings (landings without significant damage) have been performed mostly by uncrewed missions, while earlier “hard” landings involved intentional high-speed impacts. The scope of Moon landings includes both uncrewed and crewed missions, as well as different landing outcomes and mission architectures. Uncrewed landings span government and commercial efforts, including early hard-impact missions, later soft landings using braking rockets and retrorockets, and modern missions that may also return samples or operate rovers. For crewed landings, the Apollo program used a lunar module to land humans safely, and the broader mission scope also includes the supporting lunar-orbit phase needed for site selection and navigation. Technically, landing requires decelerating from lunar approach speeds to survivable contact speeds (or near-zero for soft landings), and mission planning must account for the need to leave the Moon afterward for crewed missions, which strongly influences the move from direct-to-surface approaches toward lunar-orbit rendezvous operations.
A Moon landing is the arrival of a crewed or robotic spacecraft on the Moon’s surface; soft landings are damage-minimizing and are the only practical option for humans.
Moon landing scope covers hard impacts, soft landings, rover/sample-return operations, and both uncrewed and crewed missions, with major technical differences in deceleration and mission planning.
Crewed landings require additional mission capabilities beyond reaching the surface—especially lunar-orbit operations for efficient fuel use, site selection, and navigation—driving a shift from direct ascent to lunar-orbit rendezvous profiles.
The arrival of a crewed or robotic spacecraft on the Moon’s surface.
A landing in which the spacecraft survives with no significant damage, typically by decelerating to very low speed at contact.
An intentional high-speed impact with the Moon, used when survival is not required.
The change in velocity needed to slow down for landing (and, for some missions, to enable departure), typically supplied by landing rockets.
A mission profile in which spacecraft use lunar orbit operations before and after landing, improving efficiency for crewed missions that must return to Earth.
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