Ranger 7

AUDIO: From a TV camera aboard the Ranger 7 spacecraft, about 17 minutes from lunar impact. The area covered by the initial picture, approximately 450,000 square miles.
More than three years after President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to landing a man on the Moon, things weren’t going well. Not a single American spacecraft had managed to take a picture of the Moon — and some couldn’t even hit it.
AUDIO: As each successive picture is seen, so are smaller craters and other surface features never before seen by man. 292 miles.
One of the first lunar exploration programs was Ranger. Its probes would crash into the lunar surface, snapping pictures during the last few minutes of their approach and conducting other observations. The first few missions failed, causing a program shake-up and some serious questions from Congress and the public.
But 50 years ago today, things began to turn around — Ranger 7 scored the first American success in lunar exploration. It snapped more th