Launched three days before Apollo 11, Luna 15 aimed to beat the Americans to a lunar sample return, a final Soviet bid to salvage prestige in the Moon race. The probe entered lunar orbit but ultimately crashed on the surface on July 21, hours after Armstrong and Aldrin had already walked and returned safely to their module.
Luna 15's mission was shrouded in secrecy, and Western tracking stations, including Jodrell Bank in England, monitored its radio signals with as much curiosity as NASA's own engineers monitoring Apollo. British astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell coordinated informally with Soviet scientists to avoid interference between the two missions, a rare moment of Cold War scientific cooperation amid fierce competition.
The probe's failure, a crash into the Sea of Crises after an unexpectedly mountainous approach, meant the Soviet Union would not achieve automated sample return until Luna 16 the following year. Even so, in July 1969 Luna 15 injected genuine tension into the Apollo 11 broadcast coverage, with commentators worldwide wondering whether Soviet robots might snatch some of the moon-race glory even as American astronauts made history.
The episode captured the strange endgame of the Space Race: even after conceding the crewed lunar landing, Moscow kept pushing robotic missions, and NASA and the press kept one eye on Soviet hardware even during humanity's most celebrated moonwalk.
Key people: Bernard Lovell