Ranger 3 spacecraft
Aug. 23, 1961 to Jan. 30, 1964 — The U.S.'s first plan to put metal on the moon was pretty much the same as the Soviets': a long-distance toss that would ask nothing more of the spacecraft than to crash on the lunar surface, snapping pictures throughout its final plunge and beaming them home before it was annihilated on impact. Six times, Ranger spacecraft could not achieve this simple goal — twice failing to make it out of the earth's orbit, twice flying wide of the moon, twice reaching the lunar surface but failing to return a single picture. The Russian pennant Khrushchev spoke of stayed lonely, and William Pickering, the visionary New Zealand expat who headed America's unmanned space program, was almost sacked before ever getting a machine onto another world. (No worries. He would find success with future Rangers.)