The
Soviet manned lunar programs were a series of unsuccessful programs pursued by the
Soviet Union to
land a man on the Moon,
in competition with the United States Apollo program to achieve the same goal set publicly by President
John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961. The Soviet government publicly denied participating in such a competition, but secretly pursued two programs in the 1960s: manned lunar flyby missions using
Soyuz 7K-L1 (Zond) spacecraft launched with the
Proton-K rocket, and a manned lunar landing using
Soyuz 7K-LOK and
LK Lander spacecraft launched with the
N1 rocket. Following the dual American successes of the first manned lunar orbit on December 24–25, 1968 (
Apollo 8) and the first Moon landing on July 20, 1969 (
Apollo 11), and a series of catastrophic N1 failures, both Soviet programs were eventually brought to an end. The Proton / Zond program was canceled in 1970, and the N1 / L3 program was terminated de facto in 1974 and officially canceled in 1976. Details of both Soviet programs were kept secret until 1990, when the government allowed them to be published under the policy of
glasnost.