Ranger 6: Success or Failure?

[cr4moose]

Yesterday (01/30/07) was the 43rd anniversary of the launch of Ranger 6, an unmanned spacecraft that tried but failed to capture the first close-up pictures of the surface of the moon. Was Ranger 6 a "one-hundred percent failure", as one critic claimed, or an important stepping stone on NASA's path to the moon? CR4 has a short but sweet retrospective about the launch of Ranger 6.