Several nations, either individually or as joint efforts have landed on the moon in various ways. The first man made object to touch the moon was the Soviet craft Luna 2 which was intentionally crash landed in 1959, it took another three years before the US performed the same trick with Ranger 4. The next nation to put a craft on the moon was Japan who also crash landed their Hiten craft in 1993. In 2006 the European Space Agency (ESA) crashed SMART-1 into the lunar surface - at that time the agency consisted of 17 nations: France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Austria, Finland, Portugal, Greece and Luxembourg. In 2008 India impacted the moon's crust with their Moon Impact Probe. The next high speed arrival from Earth was China's Chang'e 1, which hit the dusty surface in 2009. No other country or agency has achieved this goal.

Although this account sounds like carnage on the Moon, alongside these events many manned and many more unmanned craft have landed at speeds which allowed them to operate on the surface and in some cases (particularly the manned ones) return their cargo to Earth.

This makes a total of 6 agencies landing on the moon, but if we are to count all of the countries in the ESA it totals 22.