The Atlas-Agena rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 3:30 PM Eastern time. Its payload, Ranger 3, was a 727-pound scientific package designed for a hard landing. Its mission was not to survive, but to transmit television images and seismic data in the final minutes before it shattered on the Moon's surface. The launch was flawless. The trajectory, however, was not.
A series of small errors compounded. An incorrect value in the rocket's guidance computer. An over-performance of the Agena upper stage. The probe was aimed too precisely at a point in space the Moon would have occupied, had it been traveling slightly faster. The result was a vector that was both incredibly accurate and profoundly wrong.
Ranger 3 passed the Moon on January 28. The miss distance was 22,000 miles, or roughly 35,400 kilometers. It entered a permanent heliocentric orbit, a silent artifact circling the sun. The mission was a failure, but not a sterile one. It demonstrated the unforgiving mathematics of celestial navigation. A error measured in fractions of a degree at launch becomes a gap of tens of thousands of miles over a quarter-million-mile journey. It was a lesson in precision, purchased for $28 million, that would be applied to every successful lunar mission that followed.