soyuz

The Soyuz-A spacecraft was a proposed Soviet crewed lunar orbiter designed in the early 1960s. It was intended to be the first crewed spacecraft to orbit the Moon, as part of the Soviet Union's Cold War-era space race with the United States. The Soyuz-A was designed to carry a crew of three cosmonauts, and would have been launched by a Soyuz rocket. The spacecraft would have consisted of a spherical command module, a cylindrical service module, and a lunar module. The lunar module would have detached from the command and service modules and landed on the Moon, while the command and service modules would have remained in lunar orbit. The Soyuz-A program was cancelled in 1966, and the Soviet Union ultimately lost the Moon race to the United States.