High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! 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, returning those images until they were destroyed upon impact. A series of mishaps, however, led to the failure of the first six flights. This led to Congress launching an investigation into “problems of management” at NASA Headquarters and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After reorganizing the organization twice, Ranger 7 successfully returned images in July 1964, followed by two more successful missions.