What Countries Have Put a Man on the Moon?

Only one country has ever put a human on the Moon: the United States. Between 1969 and 1972, NASA’s Apollo program landed twelve astronauts on the lunar surface across six separate missions. Despite decades of ambition from other spacefaring nations, no other country has matched that feat, though several have accomplished uncrewed landings and multiple nations are now actively planning crewed return missions.

The Six Apollo Landings

Apollo 11 made the first crewed lunar landing on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Sea of Tranquility while Michael Collins orbited above. Five more successful landings followed: Apollo 12 (November 1969), Apollo 14 (February 1971), Apollo 15 (July 1971), Apollo 16 (April 1972), and Apollo 17 (December 1972). Each mission carried a crew of three, with two astronauts descending to the surface in the Lunar Module and one remaining in the Command Module in orbit. Apollo 13, famously, suffered an onboard explosion and had to abort its landing, but the crew returned safely to Earth.

The twelve people who walked on the Moon were all American men, all military-trained or test pilots, and all part of a workforce that peaked at roughly 400,000 people across NASA and its contractors. The total cost of the Apollo program has been re-estimated at approximately $25.8 billion in then-year dollars, with the Saturn V rocket alone consuming around $6.6 billion of that, which translates to roughly $66 billion in 2020 dollars.¹ Apollo 17 in December 1972 was the last crewed Moon mission, and no human has returned since.

Why No Other Country Landed Astronauts

The Soviet Union came closest. Its N1-L3 program aimed to beat the Americans to the Moon and included the development of the N1, a massive super-rocket whose design work began as early as 1960. But the program did not become a national priority until August 1964, years after the U.S. had committed to the Apollo effort. The N1 rocket failed on all four of its launch attempts between 1969 and 1972, and the program was formally cancelled in 1974.² A combination of factors doomed the Soviet effort: late political commitment, a fractured design bureau system with competing programs, and engineering problems with the rocket’s complex first-stage engine cluster, which used thirty smaller engines instead of fewer large ones.

No other country in the 1960s or 1970s had the economic capacity or political motivation to attempt a crewed lunar program. The Apollo missions were driven by Cold War competition, and once the geopolitical goal of “winning” the Moon race was achieved, even the United States lost the political will to continue. The last three planned Apollo missions (18, 19, and 20) were cancelled due to budget cuts. For the next half-century, crewed spaceflight focused on low-Earth orbit, with the Space Shuttle, the Mir space station, and the International Space Station dominating the agenda.

Countries That Have Landed Robotic Spacecraft

While only Americans have walked on the Moon, several countries have successfully soft-landed uncrewed spacecraft on the lunar surface. The distinction matters because it shows which nations have the fundamental technology to reach the Moon, even if they have not yet sent people there.

The Soviet Union was the first to achieve a robotic soft landing, with Luna 9 in February 1966, three years before Apollo 11. The U.S. followed with its Surveyor program. China has become the most active recent player, successfully landing Chang’e 3 (2013), Chang’e 4 (2019, the first landing on the lunar farside), Chang’e 5 (2020, a sample-return mission), and Chang’e 6 (2024). Chang’e 6 marked the first time any mission retrieved samples from the farside of the Moon, landing within the Apollo basin inside the enormous South Pole-Aitken Basin and returning material that is already reshaping understanding of the Moon’s geological diversity.³

India joined the club in August 2023 when its Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down near the lunar south pole, making India the fourth country to achieve a controlled soft landing. Japan followed in January 2024 with its SLIM (Smart Lander for Investigating Moon) mission, which achieved a precision landing accuracy of 10 meters or better, the first demonstration of pinpoint lunar landing technology.⁴ SLIM landed on its side due to an engine issue during the final descent but still operated on the surface. Several private companies have also attempted lunar landings with mixed results, including the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL’s Beresheet (crashed in 2019), the Japanese company ispace’s Hakuto-R (crashed in 2023), and the American company Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus (landed but tipped over in 2024).

So the current roster of countries with successful robotic soft landings stands at five: the Soviet Union (now Russia, though Russia has not landed anything since the Soviet era), the United States, China, India, and Japan. Of these, only the United States has sent humans along with the hardware.

The Artemis Program and NASA’s Plan to Return

NASA’s Artemis program is the primary effort underway to put humans back on the Moon. Artemis I, an uncrewed test flight of the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion capsule, orbited the Moon in late 2022. Artemis II, planned to carry a crew of four around the Moon without landing, is scheduled for the mid-2020s. Artemis III aims to land astronauts near the lunar south pole, which would be the first crewed landing since 1972 and would include the first woman and first person of color to walk on the Moon.

A key component of the broader Artemis architecture is the Lunar Gateway, a small space station that will orbit the Moon and serve as a staging point for surface missions. NASA leads the Gateway program and is integrating contributions from international partners including the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency.⁵ The Gateway builds on the partnership model developed over two decades of continuous crew operations on the International Space Station.⁶ Unlike Apollo, which was an exclusively American effort, Artemis is designed from the outset as an international endeavor, though the landing vehicle for Artemis III is being developed by SpaceX (a modified Starship).

The SLS has been considerably less expensive to develop than the Saturn V was in inflation-adjusted terms. The Saturn V consumed roughly $66 billion in 2020 dollars, while SLS development spending was projected to reach about $27 billion by its first crewed launch.¹ That said, Artemis timelines have slipped repeatedly, and the program’s per-launch costs have drawn scrutiny from Congress and NASA’s own Inspector General.

China’s Crewed Lunar Ambitions

China is the other country with a serious and publicly funded crewed lunar program. The China National Space Administration has announced plans to land Chinese astronauts (called taikonauts) on the Moon before 2030. China has been building toward this systematically: it has an operational space station (Tiangong), a successful track record of robotic lunar landings and sample returns, and is developing a new crew-rated launch vehicle and lunar lander for the mission.

China’s approach differs from the Apollo model and from Artemis. Rather than relying on a single enormous rocket, current plans involve launching two rockets and docking the components in lunar orbit. China’s robotic lunar program has been remarkably consistent in execution, with Chang’e missions 3 through 6 all meeting their objectives. The Chang’e 6 farside sample return, in particular, demonstrated the kind of deep-space relay communication and autonomous landing capability that will be necessary for crewed missions.³ If China succeeds on its announced timeline, it would become the second country to land humans on the Moon, more than half a century after the first.

What the Artemis Accords Mean for Lunar Activity

As more nations eye the Moon, the legal framework governing who can do what up there has become a live issue. The foundational treaty is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which states that the Moon and other celestial bodies cannot be subject to “national appropriation.” What that phrase means in practice has been debated for decades. Does it prohibit a country from mining lunar ice for rocket fuel? Or does it only prohibit claiming sovereignty over territory? Nations disagree sharply on the answer.⁷

The United States, through the Artemis Accords (first signed in 2020), has taken the position that extracting and using space resources is permitted under the Outer Space Treaty, as long as no nation claims sovereignty over the land itself. Think of it as the difference between owning an ocean and catching fish in it. Over thirty countries have signed the Artemis Accords, including many U.S. allies. But the Accords are not universally accepted. Critics argue that the resource-extraction provisions in Section 10 of the Accords conflict with the spirit of both the Outer Space Treaty and the 1979 Moon Agreement, which envisioned lunar resources as the “common heritage of mankind.”⁸ China and Russia have not signed the Accords and are pursuing their own International Lunar Research Station framework with a separate set of partners.

This legal ambiguity matters because future lunar missions are explicitly planning to use lunar resources. If you are going to sustain a human presence on the Moon rather than just visit, you need to make water, oxygen, and building materials on-site rather than hauling everything from Earth. That concept, called in-situ resource utilization, depends on being able to extract and process what the Moon has to offer. Whether that extraction is legally permissible under current international law is, at best, unresolved.

Why Returning Humans to the Moon Is Harder Than It Looks

A common question is why it has taken so long to go back. The U.S. did it in the 1960s with less computing power than a modern smartphone, so what is the holdup? The answer is partly political and financial, but also genuinely technical. Apollo was designed for short stays of a few days, with no intention of building lasting infrastructure. Future missions aim to establish sustained presences near the lunar south pole, where conditions are far more challenging than the equatorial sites Apollo visited.

One underappreciated hazard is lunar dust. The Moon’s surface is covered in a fine, jagged material called regolith, and particles smaller than 20 micrometers (the fraction classified as lunar dust) are especially problematic. Unlike terrestrial dust, lunar dust has never been weathered by wind or water, so its particles have sharp, glassy edges. It carries an electrostatic charge that makes it cling to almost any surface it touches, and its chemical reactivity may pose serious health risks through several mechanisms.⁹ Apollo astronauts reported mild, short-lived respiratory symptoms after exposure inside the Lunar Module, but the health effects of higher-dose or long-duration exposure remain poorly understood.

Laboratory studies using lunar dust simulants have begun to fill in the picture, and the results are concerning. When human lung cells and blood cells were exposed to a lunar dust simulant, researchers observed cell damage driven by oxidative stress, with both necrosis and early programmed cell death depending on the cell type. Damage to lysosomes, the cellular structures responsible for breaking down waste, was also detected.¹⁰ These findings suggest that managing dust exposure will be a critical engineering challenge for any crewed mission lasting more than a few days. Spacesuits, airlocks, and habitat design all need to account for dust mitigation in ways that Apollo never had to.

Using the Moon’s Own Resources

The reason most current lunar programs target the south pole region is water ice. Permanently shadowed craters near the Moon’s poles may contain significant deposits of frozen water, which could be split into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant and life support. Beyond water, lunar soil contains oxygen locked in mineral oxides, and the Moon receives abundant, unfiltered solar energy that could power extraction and manufacturing processes.¹¹

The technical challenges are considerable. The Moon has no atmosphere, so equipment must function in hard vacuum. Temperatures at the south pole swing between extremes depending on whether a location is in sunlight or shadow. Gravity is about one-sixth of Earth’s, which affects everything from how regolith behaves when excavated to how fluids move through processing equipment. Several technologies for in-situ oxygen production, construction using lunar regolith, and even small-scale plant cultivation are in various stages of development and testing, but none have been demonstrated at operational scale on the Moon itself.¹¹

If these technologies can be made to work reliably, they would transform the economics of lunar exploration. Launching one kilogram of material from Earth to the lunar surface is extraordinarily expensive, so every kilogram of water or oxygen produced locally represents a major cost savings. This is also why the legal questions around resource extraction are not abstract. The viability of a permanent human outpost may depend on whether nations can agree on the rules for using what the Moon provides.

Common Misconceptions About Lunar Exploration

One persistent myth is that the Soviet Union also landed cosmonauts on the Moon, or came close enough that it was essentially a tie. In reality, the Soviet crewed lunar program never came close to a landing. The N1 rocket never completed a successful test flight, and no Soviet cosmonaut ever left low-Earth orbit.² The Soviet Union did achieve many genuine firsts, including the first satellite, first human in space, first spacewalk, and first robotic lunar landing, but a crewed Moon landing was not among them.

Another misconception is that private companies like SpaceX have “gone to the Moon.” SpaceX has not independently landed anything on the Moon. The company is developing the Human Landing System for NASA’s Artemis III mission, but that vehicle has not yet flown to the Moon, and it would carry NASA astronauts on a NASA-led mission. The private companies that have attempted independent lunar landings, such as Intuitive Machines and ispace, have sent small robotic landers, not people. The line between government and private spaceflight is blurring, especially in the U.S., but the achievement of putting a human on the Moon still belongs entirely to national space programs, and so far, to only one of them.

A subtler misunderstanding involves the number twelve. People sometimes assume that twelve missions landed on the Moon, or that each mission put a different number of people on the surface. In fact, six missions landed, each putting two astronauts on the surface while one stayed in orbit. Twelve different individuals walked on the Moon, all between July 1969 and December 1972, all American, and as of the mid-2020s, only a handful of them are still living. The window during which any human stood on another world lasted just three and a half years.

1
Space Policy. An Improved Cost Analysis of the Apollo Program
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3
The Astronomical Journal. Lunar Farside Samples Returned by Chang’E-6 Mission: Significance for Understanding the South Pole-Aitken Basin Stratigraphic History
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Acta Astronautica. Moon landing results of SLIM: A smart lander for investigating the Moon
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NASA Technical Reports Server. Gateway Utilization Capabilities and Status
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7
Korea International Law Review. Space Resource Utilization and the International Space Law: Focusing on the Issue of “National Appropriation” Clause under Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty and the Divergent Views of States
8
Journal of Law and Policy Transformation. THE ARTEMIS ACCORDS AND PROPERTY RIGHTS IN OUTER SPACE
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PubMed Central. Overview of lunar dust toxicity risk
10
PubMed Central. Assessment of toxicity changes induced by exposure of human cells to lunar dust simulant
11
Space: Science & Technology. Overview of the Lunar In Situ Resource Utilization Techniques for Future Lunar Missions