A small spacecraft that has captured the imagination and excitement of people in Israel and around the world appears to have crashed into the moon on Thursday.

“We had a failure in the spacecraft,” Opher Doron, the general manager of Israel Aerospace Industries’ space division, which collaborated on building the spacecraft, said afterward. “We unfortunately have not managed to land successfully.”

The mood at the command center was somber but still celebratory.

“Well we didn't make it, but we definitely tried,” said Morris Kahn, an Israeli telecommunications entrepreneur and president of SpaceIL, the nonprofit that undertook the mission. “And I think the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous. I think we can be proud.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who attended the event at the mission’s command center in Yehud, Israel, said, “If at first you don’t succeed, you try again.”</s>Yesterday, Israel’s first mission to the Moon ended in a rather abrupt and unsatisfying manner. SpaceIL’s Beresheet lunar lander, which was part of a privately-funded mission that would have made Israel the fourth country to successfully land on the Moon, faltered at the very last second.

In the immediate aftermath of the lander’s crash it as unclear exactly what went wrong. An issue with the spacecraft’s engine was suspected, but the lander’s signal was lost shortly after the engine came back online so answers were hard to come by. Now, after studying the data from the landing attempt, SpaceIL has a better idea of what went wrong.

“Preliminary technical information collected by the teams shows that the first technical issue occurred at 14 km above the Moon,” SpaceIL explained in a tweet. “At 150 meters when the connection with #Beresheet was lost, it was moving at 500 km/h, making a collision inevitable.”

“Our engineers think that a technical glitch in one of the components caused the main engine to shut down – making it impossible to slow the spacecraft’s descent. By the time the engine was restarted its velocity was too high to land properly.”

This is essentially what we assumed happened based on what viewers were able to see during the live stream of the landing attempt. The engine lost power and the spacecraft’s signal went dark just moments after it was fired back up.

It’s a massive disappointment for SpaceIL and anyone who was following Beresheet’s journey. Still, the mission was a success in a number of ways, not least of which is the fact that it successfully entered lunar orbit in the first place, which is no easy task.

In a related piece of awesome news, the XPrize group has decided to award a $1 million “Moonshot Award” to SpaceIL in order to help the team get started on whatever ventures they will be pursuing next.</s>
• In February, SpaceX launched the first private moon mission.
• Beresheet, as the 1,300-lb robot is called, was designed by an Israeli nonprofit called SpaceIL.
• The four-legged moon-craft attempted a lunar landing on Thursday but crashed into the surface.
• An engine failure is suspected to be the cause of the crash.

Nearly two months after its launch with a SpaceX rocket, the first private mission ever to try landing on the moon has ended in failure.

The dishwasher-size robot, called Beresheet (a biblical reference that means “in the beginning”), attempted the first private moon landing on Thursday shortly after 3 p.m. EDT. The roughly 1,300-lb four-legged probe was designed and built by an Israeli nonprofit called SpaceIL and backed by about $100 million in private funding.

Had the mission been successful, it would have made Israel the fourth nation ever to have a spacecraft survive a lunar-landing attempt.

However, its main engine failed during its descent toward the moon. By the time mission controllers rebooted the spacecraft to try and restart the engine, according to a live broadcast of the event, it was too late.

“Beresheet crashed on the surface of the moon after the main engine broke down,” Eylon Levy, a journalist for i24NEWS, tweeted after the failure.

Beresheet transmitted one final photo from about 14 miles above the lunar surface, shown above, before its failure.

Thomas Zurbuchen, the associate administrator of NASA’s science mission directorate, commented on the failure shortly after it occurred.

“Space is hard, but worth the risks. If we succeeded every time, there would be no reward,” Zurbuchen tweeted. “It’s when we keep trying that we inspire others and achieve greatness. Thank you for inspiring us @TeamSpaceIL. We’re looking forward to future opportunities to explore the Moon together.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was present at the launch following his reelection, also commented on the failure from the mission’s control center in Yehud, Israel.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try again,” Netanyahu said.

SpaceIL announced its intention to land a privately developed and funded spacecraft on the moon in 2011, during an international space conference in Israel.

The audacity of the three young engineers behind the outfit – Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari, and Yonatan Winetraub – caught the attention of a South African-born billionaire named Morris Kahn.

“They said that they were going to participate in a Google competition. It was an XPrize competition to put a spacecraft on the moon and win a $20 million prize,” Kahn told Business Insider prior to Beresheet’s launch. “They seemed very proud of themselves, and I thought that this was rather neat.”

That competition was the Google Lunar XPRIZE, which started in September 2007. It dangled tens of millions of dollars in prize money with the hope of spurring a private company to land a robot on the moon by 2014.

No one won the lunar XPrize contest, but SpaceIL pressed forward with the financial assistance of Kahn, who had a net worth to close $1 billion at the time, and other donors. He ended up investing $43 million toward the project’s final cost of about $100 million. (The Israeli government spent about $2 million on Beresheet.)

“I don’t want to be the richest man in the cemetery. I’d like to feel that I’ve used my money productively,” Kahn said. “I’d also like to see that I’ve used it in a way that I enjoy. I enjoy this process.”

Read more: NASA’s first moon landings in nearly 50 years may happen in 2019. The agency thinks these 9 companies can get it to the lunar surface.

Kahn said it was not easy to raise the money, but he appealed to the national pride of Israelis.

“Putting a spacecraft on on the moon is a little bit of a kind of a weird project,” Kahn said. “It almost seems un-doable, and even if it was doable, it takes somebody with imagination to actually see why you would do it.”

Although the mission failed, it was relatively inexpensive compared to previous lunar-landing attempts. NASA, for example, spent about $469 million in the 1960s on seven similarly sized Surveyor lunar landers. When adjusted for inflation, that sum is roughly $3.5 billion today – about $500 million per mission.

‘It just takes one little glitch’

The planned landing site for Beresheet was Mare Serenitatis, or the “Sea of Serenity,” in the northern hemisphere of the moon. It’s a dark lava-covered site of an ancient volcanic eruption, a source of magnetic and gravitational anomalies, and – in popular culture – the left eye of the “man in the moon.”

Beresheet was designed to take measurements of the moon’s magnetic field there using an instrument supplied by the University of California, Los Angeles. SpaceIL also planned to share its data with NASA and other space agencies and “hop” Beresheet to another location using its thrusters.

Read more: The American flags on the moon are disintegrating

This did not come to pass, though.

The probe was using nine engines to brake its descent toward the lunar surface: one large, central main engine and eight smaller thrusters. However, the main engine briefly failed during the maneuver.

“We are resetting the spacecraft to try to enable the engine,” an announcer said during a live broadcast on YouTube from mission control, later confirming the reset worked and the engine had come back online.

But it was too late: Moments later, SpaceIL lost communication with the spacecraft, indicating it had likely crashed into the lunar surface. Faces of those watching from mission control following the announcement ranged from expressionless to despondent.

The mission was far from a total failure, though.

“Well, we didn’t make it, but we definitely tried,” Kahn said after failure during Thursday’s broadcast. “I think that the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous. I think we can be proud.”

Beresheet not only spent seven weeks in space, but it also closed the 239,000-mile gap between Earth and the moon, entered into lunar orbit – making Israel the seventh country ever to do so – and successfully completed a series of engine burns to poise it for a landing attempt.

Kahn told Business Insider before Beresheet’s launch that there was “no guarantee” the mission would succeed. “It just takes one little glitch,” he said.

Regardless of any failure, Kahn said in February, he thinks an “Apollo effect” of encouraging young Israelis to dream big about their futures in science and engineering is already a great success of the project.

“We’ve actually gotten to more than a million young students and we excited them about space,” Kahn said. “That objective, I think, we’ve actually already achieved.”</s>This is the first private spacecraft to ever attempt a moon landing.

Earlier today, Israel’s intrepid Beresheet spacecraft attempted to touch down on the surface of the moon. While the endeavor was regrettably not a successful one, the mission broke substantial ground in its goal to land the world’s first private spacecraft on lunar terrain.

Named after the Hebrew word for Genesis, the Beresheet aimed to become the first-ever privately developed craft to plant its landing legs on lunar soil. The unmanned vehicle was supposed to make a soft landing on the near side of the moon – the side that always faces Earth – at 3:25 p.m. ET. However, “a failure in the spacecraft” prevented the mission from reaching its goal, leaving Israel unable to safely land the craft on the moon’s surface, The Jerusalem Post is reporting.

“The State of Israel fell just short of becoming only the fourth member of a prestigious club of nations to complete the formidable task of landing a spacecraft on the lunar surface,” after the former Soviet Union, the United States, and China, notes the media outlet.

After what looked like a flawless first phase of deceleration ahead of approaching the moon, the mission’s team lost contact with the probe minutes before what would have been a historic landing. Following a series of technical problems, the craft eventually went silent, ceasing all communication with mission control in Yehud, Israel, and is presumed to have crash-landed on the lunar surface.

“If at first you don’t succeed, you try and try again – and we’ll try again,” said the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who watched the landing attempt from mission control.

Developed by the nonprofit organization SpaceIL in partnership with the government-owned aerospace company Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the Beresheet was originally built as a contender for Google’s now-defunct Lunar Xprize – an initiative that challenged private companies to try to land an unmanned craft on the moon.

At nearly five feet high, 6.5 feet wide, and weighing a little over 1,300 pounds, the Beresheet boasts the title of the smallest probe to ever aim for the moon. No bigger than a washing machine, the Israeli spacecraft took to the skies on February 21 as part of a SpaceX rideshare and successfully entered lunar orbit on April 4.

In preparation for landing day, the Beresheet had spent the last six weeks flying around planet Earth in a spiraling series of ever-widening orbits in order to raise itself toward the moon and get into the optimal position to slide into lunar orbit, notes Space. After an epic two-month journey of more than 4 million miles around the Earth, the Israeli lunar probe finally geared up for its highly anticipated touchdown on April 11.

The spacecraft had set its sights on a landing site located within a vast, ancient lava plain called Mare Serenitatis (“Sea of Serenity”), about 30 degrees north of the lunar equator. As Forbes points out, the Beresheet targeted a touchdown location found roughly halfway between the landing sites of NASA’s Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 missions.

The Israeli lunar probe began the landing process at 3:12 p.m. ET in what appeared to be very auspicious circumstances.

“The spacecraft is doing exactly what’s supposed to do right now,” Opher Doron, general manager of IAI’s space division, said at mission control two minutes later, as the Beresheet ignited its 100-pound-thrust main engine to commence the breaking process.

As Ars Technica remarked, the spacecraft fired its thrusters to reduce its velocity from about 3.7 mph (with respect to the moon) to zero. As it began its descent toward the lunar ground, the Beresheet snapped a selfie from a distance of 13.6 miles of the moon’s surface.

After an initial period of smooth sailing, the Israeli craft ran into a small snag that caused the mission’s team to lose telemetry for a few moments. At around 3:23 p.m. ET, the Beresheet suffered a problem with its main engine when the craft was about 1.2 miles away from the lunar surface and eventually lost communication with SpaceIL’s control center in Yehud.

“According to initial assessments, one of the spacecraft’s inertial measurement units (IMUs) failed during the final effort. A full investigation will now begin,” details The Jerusalem Post.

“We had a failure of the spacecraft. We unfortunately have not been able to land successfully,” Doron said during the live broadcast streamed by SpaceIL on its YouTube channel and Facebook page.

“Where we got to was very tremendous and we can be very proud,” SpaceIL chairman Morris Kahn chimed in.

While the mission ended in failure, the company’s efforts were not in vain. Following today’s landing attempt, Peter Diamandis and Anousheh Ansari from the X Prize Foundation have announced that they will grant a $1 million Moonshot Award to SpaceIL to continue the mission.

According to Netanyahu, Israel is aiming to send out another lunar lander in 2021.</s>Team SpaceIL’s Beresheet lunar failed to land on the surface of the moon on Thursday, preventing it from becoming the first Israeli spacecraft and the first privately funded probe to reach the surface of a celestial body beyond Earth.

Communication was lost as the SpaceIL team appeared to have trouble landing the spacecraft due to an apparent engine malfunction. It came at the end of a long, looping journey, a month and a half after the dishwasher-sized lander was sent into space by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with a pre-launch logistical assist from Seattle-based Spaceflight.

Beresheet, which takes its name from the Hebrew phrase for “In the Beginning,” was funded with nearly $100 million in private money, led by Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn’s $40 million contribution. Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson provided another $24 million for the effort.

The nonprofit SpaceIL team was founded in 2011 to go after the top award in the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize competition. The challenge was created to encourage private-sector lunar exploration, but the deadline came and went last year before any team could mount a moonshot.

Nevertheless, SpaceIL’s team of about 50 engineers and entrepreneurs persisted. In league with state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, SpaceIL worked with SpaceX and Spaceflight to arrange February’s launch on the Falcon 9 as a secondary payload.

Beresheet’s rocket engine executed a series of maneuvers to stretch out its elliptical orbit around Earth, and last week the spacecraft made the transition from Earth orbit to lunar orbit. That set the stage for today’s final descent.

Peter Diamandis, co-founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE, was at Mission Control in Yahud, Israel, for the landing. In an email sent before touchdown, Diamandis said the mission “will no doubt chart the path towards a new generation of low-cost scientific lunar landers.” Israel Aerospace Industries already has forged a partnership with Germany’s OHB System AG to build future lunar landers modeled after Beresheet.

Despite the failed landing, XPRIZE gave a $1 million “Moonshot Award” to SpaceIL in recognition of the team’s achievement.

The lander carried a high-resolution video camera system, a magnetometer to map the moon’s magnetic field and a mirror-like retroreflector that the laser altimeter on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter can use to gauge Beresheet’s exact position on the surface. Another payload is a CD-sized “time capsule” that contains digitized files of children’s drawings, photographs and information about Israeli culture.

An Israeli flag was emblazoned on the spacecraft, befitting a probe that’s as much about Israeli pride as it is about lunar science or commercial space exploration. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, fresh from this week’s apparent victory in parliamentary elections, tweeted good-luck wishes before the landing:

Beresheet’s landing would have made Israel the fourth country to put a robotic probe on the lunar surface, after Russia, the United States and China.
• Israel’s lunar lander switches from Earth orbit to moon orbit; touchdown in a week
• Israeli lunar lander passes tests in preparation for SpaceX launch to the moon
• ‘Big step for Israel’: SpaceX launches lunar lander along with high-flying satellites</s>There had been much excitement leading up to the landing attempt, with the agency tweeting regular updates. However, its latest message said: "#Beresheet's main engine fail! Spacecraft failed landing. Appeared to have crashed on the moon's surface!" Beresheet marks the first time the Israelis have attempted to land a craft on the surface of the Moon.

The spacecraft crashed onto the moon on Thursday after a series of technical failures during its final descent, shattering hopes of a historic controlled landing on the lunar surface. The unmanned robotic lander suffered periodic engine and communications failures during the 21 minutes or so of the landing sequence, the support team said. The final manoeuvre on Wednesday brought it into a tight elliptical orbit around the moon, 15-17 km (9-10.5 miles) from the surface at its closest. From there it was a short, nail-biting and ultimately disappointing conclusion. Team SpaceIL, tweeting via the #IsraelToTheMoon hashtag, said: "Don’t stop believing! We came close but unfortunately didn’t succeed with the landing process. More updates to follow."

After eight years of development, Beresheet - which means Genesis in Hebrew - was launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on Friday, January 22 on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket Falcon 9. Had the mission been successful, the 160-kilogram unmanned four-legged spacecraft would have been the smallest and cheapest spacecraft ever to land on the moon, with Israel becoming only the fourth nation to do so, after the United States, the Soviet Union and China. Its Mission Control room was at Israel Aerospace Industries in Yehud, Israel. Scientists had hoped to land its magnetometer, digital time capsule, and laser retroreflector on the Moon - as well as a bible.

A time capsule was also on board the lander - which included a picture of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died on the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 - as well as a lunar library containing 30 million pages on a disk from the US-based Arch Mission Foundation. Mr Ramon's widow, Rona, who was a big supporter of Beresheet, died of cancer in December. Funding came in the form of $100m in private donations – a fraction of the billions of dollars it has previously cost to get there. Israeli organisation SpaceIL is behind the lunar lander, and it has taken seven weeks to get from Earth to the Moon.</s>The Israeli spacecraft launched by SpaceX in February was set to make history Thursday after a two-month journey to the moon, but after a few intense minutes, SpaceIL confirmed the spacecraft did not survive the lunar landing.

SpaceIL's lander, called Beresheet, was expected to touch down on the lunar surface after 3:20 p.m. EST, but shortly after the spacecraft began the descent mission control lost telemetry with the spacecraft, and then there was a problem with the main engine and finally communication was lost.

If the landing had been achieved, Israel would have become the fourth country to ever land a spacecraft on the moon. That small club includes the U.S., Russia and China.

NASA's Deep Space Network allowed SpaceIL and the Israel Space Agency to communicate with Bersheet during the journey to the moon.

A NASA navigation device on Beresheet provided lunar surface location details that can be used by future landers for navigation.

To prepare for landing, the spacecraft’s engines fired, as it needed to slow from more than 3,730 mph to a full stop to touch down on the moon’s surface.

At 22 kilometers above the surface Beresheet sent back a selfie showing moon craters below and the Israeli flag with the phrase "small country, big dreams."

Those dreams were not fully realized this time. When Beresheet was about 5 meters from the landing site the spacecraft would have shut off all engines before free-falling for a moment to complete the landing. It was around this time that communication was lost with the spacecraft.

"Space is hard, but worth the risks. If we succeeded every time, there would be no reward. It’s when we keep trying that we inspire others and achieve greatness," Thomas Zurbuchen, Associate Administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, tweeted after the landing attempt. "Thank you for inspiring us @TeamSpaceIL. We’re looking forward to future opportunities to explore the Moon together."

SpaceIL's lander would have touched down within the Mare Serenitatis on the northern hemisphere of the moon. The location was chosen because of the site’s magnetic anomalies.

The private moon mission was one of several international contenders for a $20 million Google Lunar XPRIZE if they had landed on the moon by 2017. However, none of the commercial companies successfully completed that by the competition deadline.

XPRIZE officials attended the landing attempt at mission control and said the nonprofit will still receive $1 million to help them to continue their work and pursue another mission.</s>A tiny robotic lander from Israel attempted to touch down on the Moon this afternoon, but it ultimately failed to stick the landing during its final descent to the surface. As it was firing its main engine to land on the ground, some kind of failure occurred, causing the engine to shut down. The mission team got the engine back online, but it could not regain communication with the spacecraft, suggesting the lander crashed into the surface.

“We had a failure in the spacecraft,” Opher Doron, head of Israel Aerospace Industry’s space division, said during a live stream of the landing. “We unfortunately have not managed to land successfully. We are the seventh country to orbit the Moon, and the fourth to reach the Moon’s surface. It’s a tremendous achievement up until now.”

“Well, we didn’t make it, but we definitely tried.”

The vehicle that attempted the landing was called Beresheet, and it was the product of an Israeli group called SpaceIL. The organization had originally started developing the lander as part of the now-dead Google Lunar X Prize competition, a contest to send the first private vehicle to the Moon. The competition ultimately ended without a winner when none of the teams launched before the final deadline of March 31st, 2018. But SpaceIL pushed on with its mission, and it was able to launch Beresheet on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket this year.

Up until now, the mission had been proceeding smoothly. The Falcon 9 rocket deployed Beresheet into a wide orbit around Earth on February 21st, and the lander spent the last two months traveling out to the distance of the Moon. Then, last week, Beresheet entered lunar orbit in preparation for today’s event. At around 3:10PM ET today, Beresheet reoriented itself and fired its main engine to start the landing process.

“We’ve passed the point of no return.”

“We’ve passed the point of no return; we’re in the landing process,” Doron said when the landing began. The firing slowed the vehicle down and took it out of orbit. All seemed fine at first. As it descended to the surface, Beresheet even sent a picture of the sequence back to Earth — a selfie with Israel’s flag. It also sent back one final picture of the lunar surface before things turned south.

The engine firing was supposed to decrease the lander’s speed from 3,700 miles per hour (6,000 kilometers per hour) to zero. But when the spacecraft was about 4 miles (7 kilometers) from the surface, Beresheet’s engine inexplicably stopped firing. The mission team was able to reset the engine, but they lost communication with the spacecraft. The likeliest scenario is that the spacecraft came in too fast and created a new crater on the surface of the Moon.

If the landing had been successful, SpaceIL would have been the first to land a privately funded lander on the Moon’s surface. Up until now, only three countries have ever landed on the Moon — the US, Russia, and China — and all of those vehicles were overseen and funded by governments. SpaceIL claims that it took $90 million to develop Beresheet, and only about $2 million of that budget came from the Israeli government. The rest of the project was mostly funded by two big investors: a South Africa-born Israeli entrepreneur named Morris Kahn and the Adelson Family Foundation, a charity based in Los Angeles that supports Israel.

But now, the title of “first private lunar lander” is still unclaimed, though SpaceIL says it is proud of how far it got. “Well, we didn’t make it, but we definitely tried,” Kahn said during the live stream. “And I think that the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous. I think we can be proud.”

“If at first you don’t succeed, you try again.”

However, SpaceIL already insinuated that it might try to do another lunar landing in the future. “If at first you don’t succeed, you try again,” Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, said during the live stream. “We will try again,” he then said in Hebrew.

SpaceIL was also set to receive a bonus $1 million prize from the X Prize Foundation if it had successfully stuck the landing. However, heads of the foundation said they will still give the money to the nonprofit. “They managed to touch the surface of the Moon, and that’s what we were looking for in our ‘Moonshot’ award,” Anousheh Ansari, the CEO of the X Prize Foundation, said in a tweeted video.

Though today’s landing wasn’t a success, there are still more private groups aiming to touch down on the Moon in the years ahead, many of which competed in the original Google Lunar X Prize competition. One startup, Astrobotic, hopes to set up a lunar delivery service, by transporting payloads to the Moon’s surface. The company has already booked a launch for its first mission and it hopes to fly in early 2021. Japanese company ispace is also planning to send vehicles to the Moon in 2020 and 2021. The startup’s ultimate goal is to mine the Moon for resources and set up a thriving settlement on the lunar surface.

“Many of these teams continue to develop their technologies,” Ansari tells The Verge. “It’s not just about winning the prize. Maybe they started to win the prize but they continue for a lot more.”</s>Israel just became the seventh nation to orbit the moon.

After slowly spiraling away from Earth for the past six weeks, an Israeli spacecraft known as Beresheet slipped into orbit around the moon on Thursday.

This was a historic achievement for the little robot, but it paves the way for something truly epic: a lunar touchdown attempt a week from now. If Beresheet succeeds on April 11, it will become the first Israeli craft, and the first privately funded vehicle, ever to land on the surface of the moon.

"The lunar capture is an historic event in and of itself — but it also joins Israel in a seven-nation club that has entered the moon’s orbit," Morris Kahn said in a statement. "A week from today, we'll make more history by landing on the moon, joining three superpowers who have done so. Today I am proud to be an Israeli."

Kahn chairs SpaceIL, the nonprofit organization that runs Beresheet's mission along with Israel Aerospace Industries, the nation's largest aerospace and defense contractor.

The superpowers he referred to are the deep-pocketed governments of the Soviet Union, the United States and China. So Beresheet also aims to strike a blow for low-cost space exploration; the mission's total price tag, including launch, is about $100 million, project team members have said.

Beresheet's mission got its start in 2011, when SpaceIL formed to compete in the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP).

The GLXP challenged privately funded teams to land a robot on the moon, move it at least 1,650 feet (500 meters) on the surface and have it beam high-resolution imagery home to Earth. The first group to accomplish these tasks would get $20 million, and the second-place team would snare $5 million. An additional $5 million was available for various special accomplishments, bringing the total purse to $30 million.

The GLXP aimed to help spur private space exploration. The contest ended last year without a winner, but it still succeeded in its primary objective, as SpaceIL's progress to date shows. And several other former GLXP teams, including the American company Moon Express, have continued to develop their spacecraft as well.

Beresheet launched to Earth orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on the night of Feb. 21. The spacecraft performed a series of engine burns over the following six weeks, pushing the farthest reaches of its elliptical orbit closer and closer to the moon.

And Thursday, the moon reached out and grabbed Beresheet. The milestone came after a six-minute engine burn, which began at 10:18 a.m. ET. This braking maneuver reduced Beresheet's velocity relative to the moon, allowing lunar gravity to capture the craft, project team members said.

"After six weeks in space, we have succeeded in overcoming another critical stage by entering the moon’s gravity," SpaceIL CEO Ido Anteby said in the statement. "We still have a long way until the lunar landing, but I‘m convinced our team will complete the mission to land the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon, making us all proud."

The lander will spend the next week lowering and circularizing its orbit and prepping for touchdown, which will occur on the lunar near side's Mare Serenitatis ("Sea of Serenity"). The mission will end shortly after this historic moment; Beresheet is expected to operate for just two or three Earth days on the moon's surface.

The lander will gather some data during its time around and on the moon; it will measure local lunar magnetic fields, for example. And Beresheet carries a technology demonstration for NASA — a small laser retroreflector array, which could help future spacecraft perform precision landings on the moon and other celestial bodies.

But Beresheet's main goals aren't scientific. The mission aims to advance Israel's space program and to inspire children around the world — but especially in Israel — to care more about science, technology, engineering and math.

This outreach work has already begun. SpaceIL personnel have met with more than 1 million Israeli schoolchildren since the nonprofit was created in 2011, mission team members said. And Beresheet's handlers have released photos from Earth orbit showing the lander's Israeli flag in the foreground and its home planet in the background.

Beresheet is also helping preserve human culture. The lander carries a time capsule that contains, among things, a "lunar library" put together by the nonprofit Arch Mission Foundation.

The library is part of Arch's Billion Year Archive initiative, which stores backups of our species' accumulated knowledge at various locations on and off Earth.

"By delivering many copies to many places, and updating them with new installments on an ongoing basis, we intend to gradually pepper the solar system with the records of our civilization," Arch Mission Foundation representatives wrote in a project description.

"The more Arch Libraries we deliver into the Billion Year Archive, and [the] more places we store them, the more likely it is that at least some of them will survive for billions of years into the future, when they may eventually be found by those who come after us," they added.
• Why It'll Take Israel's Lunar Lander 8 Weeks to Get to the Moon

SIGN UP FOR THE MACH NEWSLETTER AND FOLLOW NBC NEWS MACH ON TWITTER, FACEBOOK, AND INSTAGRAM.</s>An Israeli spacecraft has failed in its bid to become the first private craft to land on the moon after crashing on the lunar surface.

Non-profit organisation SpaceIL had been hoping to see its Beresheet craft complete a landing on the moon, and in the process make Israel only the fourth country to manage the feat.

But Doron Opher, general manager of the space division of Israel Aerospace Industries, said the craft “definitely crashed on the surface of the moon”.

The spacecraft lost communication with Earth just moments before it was to touch down.

“If at first you don’t succeed, try try again,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was on hand for what organisers had hoped to be a celebration.

The lander – whose name is Hebrew for Genesis – took off almost two months ago from Cape Canaveral in Florida as part of a “ride share” with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, as the Beresheet mission could not afford its own rocket.

The four-legged spacecraft, which is around the size of a washing machine, had been circling the Earth in increasingly large orbits waiting to be captured by the moon’s gravity.

It was expected to land in the Sea of Serenity, on the northern hemisphere of the moon’s near side.

A time capsule was on board the lander — which included a picture of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died on the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 — as well as a lunar library containing 30 million pages on a disk from the US-based Arch Mission Foundation.

Mr Ramon’s widow, Rona, who was a big supporter of Beresheet, died of cancer in December.
Israel's Beresheet lunar lander crashes at Mare Serenitatis on the surface of the Moon. The crash resulted from a failure in the lander's main engine, resulting in the total loss of the spacecraft.