SpaceIL

SpaceIL is an Israeli private non profit association, established in 2011¹, that competed in the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) contest to land a spacecraft on the Moon by private organization. SpaceIL successfully launched its Beresheet lander on 22 February 2019 at 01:45 UTC; it entered lunar orbit on 4 April 2019 at 14:18 UTC. On 11 April 2019, during the landing procedure, a problem occurred in the final stage of the landing process. Consequently, communications were lost with the spacecraft, long enough for the speed braking process to fail, and the vehicle crashed on the lunar surface. The Beresheet mission had included plans to measure the Moon's magnetic field at the landing site, and was carrying a laser retroreflector, and a "time capsule" containing analog and digital information, created by the Arch Mission Foundation. Beresheet was the first Israeli spacecraft to travel beyond Earth's orbit and was the first privately funded landing on the Moon. Though the spacecraft crashed, Israel became the seventh country to make lunar orbit and the fourth country, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and China to attempt a soft landing on the Moon. Two days after the failed attempt to soft land on the Moon, SpaceIL announced plans for a second attempt, Beresheet 2. This mission has been suspended in 2025 due to lack of funding.…

SpaceIL is an Israeli private non profit association, established in 2011, that competed in the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) contest to land a spacecraft on the Moon by private organization. SpaceIL successfully launched its Beresheet lander on 22 February 2019 at 01:45 UTC; it entered lunar orbit on 4 April 2019 at 14:18 UTC. On 11 April 2019, during the landing procedure, a problem occurred in the final stage of the landing process. Consequently, communications were lost with the spacecraft, long enough for the speed braking process to fail, and the vehicle crashed on the lunar surface. The Beresheet mission had included plans to measure the Moon's magnetic field at the landing site, and was carrying a laser retroreflector, and a "time capsule" containing analog and digital information, created by the Arch Mission Foundation. Beresheet was the first Israeli spacecraft to travel beyond Earth's orbit and was the first privately funded landing on the Moon. Though the spacecraft crashed, Israel became the seventh country to make lunar orbit and the fourth country, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and China to attempt a soft landing on the Moon. Two days after the failed attempt to soft land on the Moon, SpaceIL announced plans for a second attempt, Beresheet 2. This mission has been suspended in 2025 due to lack of funding. The SpaceIL team was founded as a nonprofit organization wishing to promote scientific and technological education in Israel. Its total budget for the mission was estimated at , mostly donated by Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn, Sheldon Edelson and other philanthropists, as well as the Israel Space Agency (ISA). ==History== SpaceIL began as a competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP), which offered in prizes to inspire teams to develop low-cost methods of robotic lunar exploration. The SpaceIL entry was unique among GLXP contenders, in that instead of building a tracked or wheeled rover, SpaceIL planned to meet the requirement to travel on the lunar surface by having the lander "hop" using rocket engine propulsion from its landing site to another site more than 500 meters away. By June 2017, the lander spacecraft was undergoing integration and testing, and in August 2017, Google Lunar XPrize announced an extension of the prize competition deadline to 31 March 2018, but the contest ended without a winner when no team launched before the deadline. Nevertheless, SpaceIL continued development and fabrication. By January 2019, testing was complete and the spacecraft was delivered to Cape Canaveral, Florida for launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The mission was successfully launched on 22 February 2019. The CEO of SpaceIL was Ido Anteby, and the president remains Morris Kahn. On 11 April 2019, its main engine malfunctioned during descent, and the lander crashed on the Moon's surface. Though the mission failed, Israel was the seventh country to have a spacecraft orbit the Moon. ===Founders and supporters=== The cofounders of the team were Yariv Bash, former electronics and computer engineer in the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, and Flytrex CEO; Kfir Damari, a Computer Networking lecturer and entrepreneur; and Yonatan Winetraub, formerly a satellite systems engineer at Israel Aerospace Industries and a biophysics PhD candidate at Stanford University. Morris Kahn was the chairman of the public board . The CEO of SpaceIL was Ido Anteby since 2018. The team has technical support from the Israel Space Agency (ISA), Israel Aerospace Industries, Rafael Systems and Elbit Systems. SpaceIL was also supported by educational institutions, including the Technion, Tel Aviv University, Weizmann Institute of Science and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. . The founders of the team stated that if they had won the competition, the money would have been donated to educational purposes. After building the Beresheet lunar lander, its prime contractor Israel Aerospace Industries was contemplating the possibility of building commercial landers. ===Payload=== The spacecraft carried a "time capsule" created by the Arch Mission Foundation, containing over 30 million pages of analog and digital data, including a full copy of the English-language Wikipedia, the Wearable Rosetta disc, the PanLex database, the Torah, children's drawings, a children's book inspired by the space launch, memoirs of a Holocaust survivor, Israel's national anthem (Hatikvah), the Israeli flag, and a copy of the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Its scientific payload included a magnetometer supplied by the Israeli Weizmann Institute of Science to measure the local magnetic field, and a laser retroreflector array supplied by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to enable precise measurements of the Earth–Moon distance. ===Propulsion=== The spacecraft featured one main LEROS 2b and 8 DST-12 small liquid-propellant, restartable rocket engine, using monomethylhydrazine (MMH) fuel and mixed oxides of nitrogen (MON) as oxidizer. This single engine was used to reach lunar orbit, as well as for deceleration and propulsive landing. The DST12 engines were mainly used for flight control maneuvers ==References== ==External links== Official website Beresheet orbit tracking

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