An Israeli spacecraft rocketed toward the moon for the country’s first attempted lunar landing, following a launch on Thursday night by SpaceX.
By Marcia Dunn, Associated Press
February 22 2019 3:11 AM
An Israeli spacecraft rocketed toward the moon for the country’s first attempted lunar landing, following a launch on 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.
Successful deployment of the SpaceIL lunar lander confirmed, starting the spacecraft’s two-month voyage to the Moon pic.twitter.com/iMlVYJHef3
Israel seeks to become only the fourth country to successfully land on the moon, after Russia, the US 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 organisation behind the effort.
The four-legged Beresheet, barely the size of a washing machine, will circle Earth in ever bigger loops until it is captured by lunar gravity and goes into orbit around the moon. Touchdown would be on 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-dollar Beresheet mission could not afford its own rocket — even a little one — so the organisers opted for a ride share.
That makes for a much longer trip; the moon right now is nearly 230,000 miles (370,000km) away.
