Israel’s Mission to the Moon

Yariv Bash, Yonatan Winetraub, and Kfir Damari, three of SpaceIL's founders, with a model of the unmanned spacecraft they aim to land on the surface of the moon.
By Aaron J. Klein

Confronted with the notion of Israel sending a spacecraft to the moon, as Yanki Margalit was one day two years ago, the hi-tech millionaire recalled his options as one or the other: He could laugh, which he acknowledged was a reasonable temptation. Or he could do what he went ahead and did, putting up the $50,000 required to enter Google’s Lunar X Prize international space race. The entry fee was pocket change beside the $30 million it will take to put together the first soft lunar landing since the Soviet Union’s Luna 24 returned with some soil samples in 1976.
“We were naïve,” says Margalit, of the initial estimates developed by Team SpaceIL.
“In the beginning we thought it would cost $8 million and the spaceship would be the size of a Coke bottle.” The reality turned out to be larger in every way: The unmanned craft Margalit’s team aims to land on the lunar surface before the end of 2015 looks more like a credenza...Continue reading...