Some nights, the moon may look close enough to touch , but only a handful of teams have succeeded in reaching the lunar surface. The USSR did it in 1966 and the U.S. followed just four months later. China pulled it off in 2013 and again just recently , in January 2019. In April 2019, an Israeli nonprofit organization called SpaceIL tried to become the first Israeli entity to land a spacecraft on the surface of the moon, but it failed to stick the landing. Israel and SpaceIL aren't throwing in the towel just yet. Just days after the failed attempt, Morris Kahn, the billionaire businessman, philanthropist and SpaceIL president, confirmed that the SpaceIL team had already scheduled meetings to begin planning the Beresheet 2.0 mission. "We're going to actually build a new halalit — a new spacecraft," Kahn said in a video statement posted on Twitter by SpaceIL. "We're going to put it on the moon, and we're going to complete the mission." SpaceIL's lunar lander, Beresheet, launched from Cape Canaveral on a used SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 21, 2019, along with an Indonesian communications satellite and a U.S. Air Force satellite. Over nearly two months, the craft maneuvered into successively longer loops around the planet until reached the moon. Beresheet carried a time capsule of digital records and an instrument to study the moon's magnetic field. Although the spacecraft failed to touch down safely, it was the first attempted moon landing for Israel and the first for a privately funded organization from anywhere. While previous moonshots culminated from years of concerted governmental effort, SpaceIL operates more like a startup company. Inspired by the Google Lunar X Prize , an international competition to land a probe on the moon, computer engineer Yariv Bash launched the endeavor in 2010. Bash started with a web domain and a Facebook post asking, "Who wants to go to the moon," according to SpaceIL educational volunteers manager Hili Shapiro. Initially, Bash and his two co-founders hoped to land a water bottle-size probe on the moon by the end of 2012 to win the $20 million purse. In addition to research, the team's early efforts focused on securing funding and finding rocket scientists. "You can't build a spacecraft with only three people," Shapiro told Space.com. Over the course of the project, SpaceIL managed to raise at least $100 million from major donors and recruit scores of volunteers; Shapiro estimates that roughly 80 percent of the nearly 200-person organization consists of volunteers, including some engineers. After building the company, SpaceIL had to build the spacecraft. Engineering began in earnest after the team secured a launch contract with SpaceX in 2015 and determined how much volume would be available on the rocket. And it wasn't a lot. To keep costs low, SpaceIL agreed to share a rocket with two other satellites. The shared launch would bring the craft only to Earth orbit, from which point the lunar lander would have to fly itself all the way to the moon. The added fuel requirements of this approach killed plans for the water-bottle-size probe, so blueprints for a 1,314-lb. (596 kilograms), smart-car-size, four-legged lander took their place. [ Israel's 1st Moon Lander: The SpaceIL Beresheet Lunar Mission in Pictures ] The Beresheet spacecraft captured this "selfie" during its landing maneuver on April 11, 2019. (Image credit: SpaceIL/IAI) The cramped rocket didn't allow room for Beresheet to include backup systems, such as an extra computer to test code or run updates. Any major system failure would doom the craft, according to flight software developer Shai Yehezkel; however, mission control made minor tweaks to adapt on the fly, such as configuring the craft to reject faulty star readings that unexpectedly cropped up when Earth blocked part of the craft's field of view. "The best engineering work was made from the limited budget," Yehezkel told Space.com. "We know how to improvise." The X Prize expired unclaimed in 2018, but SpaceIL's outreach-driven mission has kept the company going. Shapiro estimates that the company's volunteers lecture 20,000 students each month, and cereal boxes across Israel recently featured cardboard cutouts of Beresheet, which means "in the beginning," or "genesis," in Hebrew. "We are not just saying to dream big," Shapiro said. "We are actually showing them that we are doing it." Beresheet made three orbits around Earth, each longer than the last, until the craft crossed paths with the moon. The original goal was to loop around the moon twice before touching down in the Mare Serenitatis, or Sea of Serenity, on April 11, 2019, at the end of a two-week long lunar night, the flight team expected. The early morning light of the subsequent two-week lunar day gave the probe the energy it needed to record the local magnetic field, an experiment run in collaboration with NASA. But even it had landed successfully, the same sunlight would have soon spelled Beresheet's demise, overheating the lander's electronics. Now, the vehicle has become a monument . It's also an archive, as it carried a DVD-sized digital-analog hybrid disks bearing copies of the Bible, drawings from Israeli schoolchildren, English Wikipedia and 30 million pages of records representing a "backup" of humanity's knowledge. SpaceIL hopes future moonwalkers might decode the time capsule and learn about Earth in 2019. "We are throwing them a challenge," Yehezkel said. Despite Beresheet's disappointing crash-landing, the SpaceIL team remains dedicated to their goal of successfully landing an Israeli spacecraft on the moon. Israel Aerospace Industries, the contractor who built the craft, has signed an agreement with a German firm to build similar landers for the European Space Agency in the future. SpaceIL plans to continue its educational activities and seeks an Israeli " Apollo effect " to inspire the next generation of space enthusiasts, Shapiro said. "We hope our story will begin more stories." Additional resources: This article was updated April 15, 2019 by Space.com Reference Editor Kimberly Hickok.<doc-sep>A team of Israeli scientists is to launch what will be the first privately funded mission to land on the moon this week, sending a spacecraft to collect data from the lunar surface. Named Beresheet, the Hebrew word for Genesis, the 585kg (1,290lb) robotic lander will blast off from Florida at 01.45 GMT on Friday, propelled by one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. Once it touches down, in several weeks, it will measure the magnetic field of the moon to help understand how it formed. Beresheet will also deposit a “time capsule” of digital files the size of coins containing the Bible, children’s drawings, Israel’s national anthem and blue and white flag, as well as memories of a Holocaust survivor. “It’s going to be on the moon forever,” said Yonatan Weintraub, the co-founder of SpaceIL, the non-profit organisation leading the project. While it is not a government-led initiative, the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) corporation joined as a partner. If the mission is successful, Israel will become the fourth country, after Russia, the US and China, to reach the moon. “This is the lowest-budget spacecraft to ever undertake such a mission,” an IAI statement said of the £77m project. “The superpowers who managed to land a spacecraft on the moon have spent hundreds of millions.” It added that although it was a private venture, Beresheet was a “national and historic achievement”. Crewed trips to the moon in the late 1960s and early 70s took around three days, but the probe will take a less direct route. It will first move in ever-growing elliptical orbits around the Earth until it intercepts the moon’s gravitational pull. Its creators have estimated it will land on 11 April. SpaceIL was established in 2011 with the goal of winning the Google Lunar XPrize, which put up a $30m (£23m) reward for a privately funded team to land an automated spacecraft on the moon, “hop” 500 metres and transmit images back to Earth. Although the contest closed without a winner, SpaceIL decided to continue and gather funds elsewhere. Morris Kahn, a South African-born Israeli billionaire, is the main backer but SpaceIL said US Republican party and pro-Israel funder Miriam Adelson and her casino-owning husband, Sheldon, gave $24m. Russia was the first country to make a soft landing, rather than a plummeting crash, on the surface of the moon in 1966. But following the end of the space race in the 1970s, there was no return until China sent a lander in 2013. In January this year, Beijing made history by landing a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. With Mars remaining a distant and challenging prospect, there has been a revival of interest in lunar visits. Later in 2019, two more moon missions are scheduled, one rover made by India and another Chinese lander. The Trump administration has made human flight to the moon a top priority, while Nasa increasingly looks to private firms to help it reduce the cost. A US-led plan to build a small crewed space station orbiting the moon is under way, and Nasa has asked the commercial sector to bid to make the technology.<doc-sep>
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — An Israeli spacecraft rocketed toward the moon for the country's first attempted lunar landing, following a launch Thursday night by SpaceX. A communications satellite for Indonesia was the main cargo aboard the Falcon 9 rocket, which illuminated the sky as it took flight. But Israel's privately funded lunar lander — a first not just for Israel but commercial space — generated the buzz. Israel seeks to become only the fourth country to successfully land on the moon, after Russia, the U.S. and China. The spacecraft — called Beresheet, Hebrew for Genesis or "In The Beginning" — will take nearly two months to reach the moon. "We thought it's about time for a change, and we want to get little Israel all the way to the moon," said Yonatan Winetraub, co-founder of Israel's SpaceIL, a nonprofit organization behind the effort. The moon, nearly full and glowing brightly, beckoned as it rose in the eastern sky. Within an hour after liftoff, Beresheet was already sending back data and had successfully deployed its landing legs, according to SpaceIL. "We'll keep analyzing the data, but bottom line is we entered the very exclusive group of countries that have launched a spacecraft to the moon," said Yigal Harel, head of SpaceIL's spacecraft program. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was watching the launch live from the Israeli control center in Yehud, near Tel Aviv. "This is a big step for Israel, but a giant step for Israeli technology," he said. The four-legged Beresheet, barely the size of a washing machine, will circle Earth in ever bigger loops until it's captured by lunar gravity and goes into orbit around the moon. Touchdown would be April 11 at the Sea of Serenity. NASA's Apollo missions in the 1960s and 1970s took about three days to get astronauts to the moon, but they used monstrous Saturn V rockets. The $100 million Beresheet mission couldn't afford its own rocket — even a little one — so the organizers opted for a ride share. That makes for a much longer trip; the moon right now is nearly 230,000 miles (370,000 kilometers) away. "This is Uber-style space exploration, so we're riding shotgun on the rocket," Winetraub explained at a news conference on the eve of launch. The U.S. Air Force also has a small research spacecraft aboard the rocket, for a one-year mission in orbit around Earth. The Soviet Union was the first to put a spacecraft on the moon, Luna 2, in 1959. NASA followed with the Ranger 4 spacecraft in 1962. Last month, China became the first country to land on the far side of the moon. Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin quickly offered congratulations following Thursday's launch. So did NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, who called it "a historic step for all nations and commercial space as we look to extend our collaborations beyond low-Earth orbit and on to the moon." NASA has a laser reflector aboard Beresheet and is offering its Deep Space Network for communication. "All the best to @TeamSpaceIL as it starts its journey tonight on a @SpaceX #Falcon9 from Florida to my old stomping ground ...the moon," Aldrin tweeted. The Beresheet mission originally was part of the Google Lunar XPrize competition and even made the final cut before the contest ended last year without a winner. The organizers decided to press ahead on their own, with donations from billionaires as well as schoolchildren. Lunar surface operations are meant to last just two days. Beresheet will measure the magnetic field at the landing site, and send back data and pictures. A time capsule is aboard the lander — which includes a picture of Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon, who died aboard space shuttle Columbia in 2003 — as well as a lunar library containing 30 million pages on a disk from the U.S.-based Arch Mission Foundation. Ramon's widow, Rona, was a big supporter of Beresheet; she died of cancer in December. Following liftoff, SpaceX recovered the first-stage booster, which flew twice last year. The booster landed smoothly on an offshore ocean platform, after the hottest re-entry yet, according to SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk. Sparks from burning metal were visible in the landing video. Musk said the booster will fly a fourth time in April, during a launch abort test of the new crew Dragon capsule. No one will be aboard. The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Department of Science Education.