MOSCOW, July 20 (RIA Novosti) - Soviet cosmonaut...

An estimated 500 million people on Earth watched on TV the first landing of U.S. astronauts on the Moon. However, governments in the Soviet Union and China banned the transmission from space for ideological reasons.

"The reports on U.S. missions to the Moon were televised around the world, and only two countries, the USSR and China, refused to show these historic images to their people," the veteran cosmonaut said.

"I always believed it was a big mistake, we simply robbed our own people, because the flight to the Moon was the achievement and the heritage of the whole of humanity," Leonov said.