When did astronauts first land on the moon?

The first crewed lunar landing took place on 20 July 1969, when Eagle, the Apollo 11 lunar module, settled onto the basaltic plain of Mare Tranquillitatis with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard. Armstrong's first footstep came several hours after touchdown, once the crew had checked the lander's systems and prepared for the walk. In Coordinated Universal Time the footstep falls in the early hours of 21 July, which is why some countries remember the anniversary a day later than the United States does.

The descent was not routine. The onboard computer raised program alarms caused by an unexpected data load, and Armstrong took semi-manual control to steer past a crater strewn with boulders, landing with very little propellant left in the descent stage.

Machines got there long before people. The Soviet Luna 9 achieved the first soft landing on the Moon in February 1966 and returned images from the surface, and the American Surveyor series followed later that year, proving that the regolith would bear the weight of a spacecraft. That question mattered: before Surveyor, engineers could not rule out that a lander might sink into deep dust.

Apollo 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 repeated the feat, with the final crewed landing in December 1972. Apollo 13 suffered an oxygen tank failure on the way out and looped around the Moon without landing. In total twelve people have walked on the lunar surface, all of them within a span of three and a half years. No crew has returned since, although several national and commercial programmes are now working towards it.