On this day in space! July 13, 1969: Soviet Union launches Luna 15 mission to the moon

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On July 13, 1969, the Soviet Union launched its Luna 15 spacecraft on a mission to the moon.

On July 13, 1969, the Soviet Union launched its Luna 15 spacecraft on a mission to the moon. Luna 15 was a robotic sample return mission sent to retrieve some lunar soil and bring it back to Earth.

The Soviet Luna 15 mission. (Image credit: For All Moonkind)

It launched just three days before Apollo 11, which brought the first astronauts to the lunar surface. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin beat Luna 15 to the moon by about 20 hours. Talk about a space race!

Just a few minutes after the Soviet spacecraft began its descent on July 21, it unexpectedly crashed into a mountain and stopped transmitting data back to mission control.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.