No spacecraft has ever landed near the Moon's south pole
The old claim turned out to be wrong and was rejected by evidence.
TaughtEvery Moon landing (Apollo, the Soviet and Chinese landers) touched down in the relatively flat, easy terrain near the equator. The south polar region, with its rugged shadows and craters that may hold water ice, was a place probes flew over or crashed into, never a place anyone had softly landed.
NowOn 23 August 2023, India's Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down at about 69° south: the first soft landing anywhere near the lunar south pole, and the fourth country ever to land on the Moon.
What actually happened
The south pole is the hard, interesting part of the Moon: its permanently shadowed crater floors may hold water ice, which makes it the prize for future bases, and its terrain makes landing genuinely riskier than the equatorial sites of the past. India's previous attempt, Chandrayaan-2, had crashed there in 2019.
Chandrayaan-3 succeeded, deploying the Pragyan rover to study the surface through a single lunar day. The honest scope: '69° south' is near the pole, not exactly on it, and the mission lasted about two weeks before the lunar night. But the specific line taught for decades, that no one has landed near the Moon's south pole, was retired that August.
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Who was taught this
Still standard through 2023, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2023 learned the earlier version.