Luna 3 faxed this and other images back.

On October 4, 1958, the USSR launched Luna 3, which, as you can tell by its name, was a lunar probe. It did something that had never been done, which shouldn’t be surprising, because in 1958, not a lot of things had been done in space.

Luna 3 passed behind the moon and was the first space probe to use gravity assist to change its path and arrive at another planet. Of course, that planet was Earth, but still, a pretty impressive feat. But that isn’t what Luna 3 was known for. Rather, it was the photos of the dark side of the moon that it took on October 7, 1958, 61 years ago.

The photos weren’t that great, but still took 10 days to transmit because they had really slow WiFi or something. They didn’t even have dial-up. Backwards Russkies.

But, it gave us the first look of the back of the moon, something that only 24 men have seen with their own eyes. All U. S. astronauts, of course.

But it wasn’t U.S. eyes that saw the far side first. It was Russians. I blame Donald Trump.