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by dragonwriter 4665 days ago
> But for a few years starting in 1969 we routinely soft landed a rocket on an unmapped alien surface

Er, no, we didn't. Before we started landing people on the moon, we sent a series of unmanned mapping missions to the moon so that we wouldn't be trying to land on an unmapped alien surface. [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Orbiter_program