Mission Summary
Surveyor 6 became the first spacecraft ever to lift off from the surface of the Moon, performing a short hop that previewed the liftoff a crewed lander would one day make. Launched November 7, 1967, it set down in Sinus Medii, a candidate Apollo site near the center of the lunar disk.
Touching down on November 10, 1967, the lander returned nearly 30,000 images and gathered about 30 hours of data with its alpha-backscatter instrument on the chemical makeup of the soil. The flight helped confirm the equatorial terrain that Apollo planners were weighing for the first crewed landings.
On November 17, controllers commanded Surveyor 6 to fire its three main thrusters for 2.5 seconds. The lander rose about 3 meters and set down again some 2.5 meters to the west, the first liftoff from the lunar surface. From its new vantage point the cameras photographed the original footpad prints to study the soil and capture stereo views of the site before operations ended.
Sources and notes can be found on the Sources page.
