The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet will be launched toward the moon from Cape Canaveral tomorrow, Feb. 22. Beresheet, Hebrew for “Genesis,” will be the smallest spacecraft ever dispatched to the moon, but its small size is not the lunar lander's only unique feature. It will also be the first such spacecraft to be launched by a private group of individuals — Yariv Bash, Yonatan Winetraub and Kfir Damari — and not by a superpower or even a state. The three young engineers will control their craft from their company headquarters in the town of Yahud, near Israel international Ben-Gurion Airport.
The Bersheet project began in 2010 as an entry in Google’s international Lunar XPRIZE contest, which offered $20 million for a winning project to place a probe on the moon. The three Israeli applicants formed a non-profit organization, calling it SpaceIL, with the double goal of landing the first Israeli craft on the moon and inspiring young Israelis to undertake scientific and technological studies. They subsequently hooked up with Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI) and raised funds from business tycoons such as Morris Kahn, Sheldon Adelson, Steven Grand and other donors.
On Jan. 23, 2018, after a year-long extension of the deadline, the XPRIZE Foundation announced that none of the 34 teams from around the world had won the competition and landed a spacecraft on the moon by the deadline. Nonetheless, the three Israelis decided to forge ahead, hoping their spacecraft would land on the moon on April 11, 2019, and make Israel the fourth country in the world after the United States, Russia and China to plant a flag on the moon.
“The mission placing Israel alongside world powers will provide a tremendous impetus for Israel’s burgeoning space industry,” Tel Aviv University researcher Adi Nino-Greenberg told Al-Monitor. “This is an extraordinary achievement for a small group of young people entering the space industry, mobilizing a great many other dreamers for their enterprise, setting a target and attaining it: Building a spacecraft from scratch and dispatching it to the moon. And it was all accomplished by a privately funded and executed initiative. This is source of great pride and respect.”
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