And if we're talking US, then it would be Ranger 4 in '62 (unmanned), and '
69 for the first man on the moon.
Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is rubbish. Claiming that a lot of university education is rubbish doesn't devalue the useful 10%.
People complain that allowing more people to go through university lowers t he quality of the output - which is true in the sense that more university teaching time is wasted on people who won't finish their degrees - but even in the group that squeezes into university with the lowest possible univer sity entrance results, some soak up enough to graduate and go on to perform as well as people who looked cleverer at school.
Tertiary training relies on different skills and character strengths than t hose selected by university entrance exams, and those exams have regrettabl y high levels of false negatives.
Universities do imagine that the facts that they teach people are valuable. In reality, what they teach is how to find the facts and how to put them t ogether into a coherent and persuasive argument.
Some clown electronics professor recently argued that what you are taught a t the university has a half-life of 18 months, as Mores Law makes it obsole te.
Every electronic engineer I've known has spent an appreciable portion of th eir time keeping track of the new devices as they come on the market and wo rking out how they can be applied to solving the problems they are being as ked to solve at the time. If you mover to a new problem, you have to do a b unch of reading and searching to find what has happened since your last exp edition into that area.