The
Ranger program was a series of
unmanned space missions by the
United States in the 1960s whose objective was to obtain the first close-up images of the surface of the
Moon. The Ranger spacecraft were designed to take images of the lunar surface, transmitting those images to Earth until the spacecraft were destroyed upon impact. A series of mishaps, however, led to the failure of the first six flights. At one point, the program was called "shoot and hope". Congress launched an investigation into “problems of management” at
NASA Headquarters and
Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After two reorganizations of the agencies,
Ranger 7 successfully returned images in July 1964, followed by two more successful missions.