President John F. Kennedy kicked off the moon race in 1961 by announcing that the U.S. would put a man on the moon by the decade's end. NASA’s program to reach the moon before the Soviet Union was public information from then on. In contrast, the Soviet Union didn’t publicize its own program or even officially admit it had one. After the U.S. reached the moon on July 20, 1969, the Soviet Union continued its lunar-landing program into the early ‘70s while still publicly denying its existence.
