The Explorers' Club, № CMIX

Operation AXIOM: Destination Moon—The 60th Anniversary of Ranger 5
18 October 1962: Ranger 5 lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station atop an Atlas-Agena rocket; fifteen minutes into a flight, a fault disabled the solar panels, giving Ranger 5 only a few hours of battery power; a necessary midcourse correction burn could not be executed, so Ranger 5 missed the Moon entirely (into which it was meant to crash) & eventually entered a heliocentric orbit.

Commentary: The last image is a representation of how the launch of Ranger 5's lunar capsule, which carried a seismograph to gather data from the crash of the main probe with the lunar surface, would have looked. Ranger 5 was the fifth consecutive Ranger mission to fail. Ad astra per aspera, indeed.

Semper exploro.