57 years ago, on September 12, 1959, a launch vehicle Vostok-L was launched from the Baikonur launch site. It put into a lunar flight path the Luna-2 space probe which was to become the world’s first space probe to reach the surface of the Earth’s natural satellite.

The lunar landing took place two days later. These first-generation space probes were delivered from the Earth to the Moon without flight path correction, without braking maneuvers in the lunar space. Nevertheless, the mission was a success. Luna-2 and the last stage of the launch vehicle reached the lunar surface to the west of Sea of Serenity, near the craters Aristillus, Archimedes and Autolycus. Delivered to the lunar surface were so-called ‘pennants’ with the image of the State Emblem of the USSR. And new scientific data were sent back to Earth. Thus, it turned out that the Moon has virtually no magnetic field of its own or any radiation belt.

On the next day Special Design Bureau 1 (now RSC Energia), which took part in the development of the space probe Luna-2, received congratulation from the USSR government addressed to “scientists, designers, engineers, technicians, workers and the entire team”. The message reads: “The launch of the second Soviet space rocket, which on September 14 reached the surface of the Moon, ushers in a new era in the mankind’s conquest of space; for the first time in history a flight from Earth to another heavenly body was achieved”.

Subsequently, a mockup of Luna-2 and a rocket stage were displayed at technical exhibitions in Europe. The then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev presented the US president Dwight Eisenhower with a replica of the spherical “pennant”, which was delivered to the Moon. It is now kept at the Kansas Cosmosphere museum.