Contact With The Beresheet Spacecraft Lost During Descent To The Lunar Surface

SpaceIL got ever so close, but in the end was not able to land its Beresheet lunar lander on the surface of the Moon.

The landing attempt was planned for 3:25 p.m. Thursday afternoon. At about 3:24, controllers announced they had lost contact with the spacecraft. About two minutes later, Morris Kahn, an Israeli telecommunications entrepreneur and president of SpaceIL said from mission control that they had been unsuccessful in the landing attempt.

The rocket motor apparently cut out during the descent. It was successfully restarted, but then contact was lost. The SpaceIL team quickly realized that their landing was not going to be a success.

“Well we didn't make it, but we definitely tried,” Kahn said. “I think we can be proud.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was present for the landing attempt, said "If at first you don't succeed, you try again."

SpaceIL was one of the companies that had participated in the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon without the assistance of any government entity.

The non-profit organization was founded in 2011 by three young engineers: Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub who answered the international challenge presented by Google Lunar XPRIZE: to build, launch and land an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon. SpaceIL was the only Israeli representative. In October 2015, SpaceIL reached a dramatic project milestone by becoming the first team to announce a signed launch contract, that symbolizes an actual "ticket to the Moon". In January 2017, SpaceIL became one of the competition’s five finalists. The competition officially ended with no winners in March 31, 2018, after Google ended their sponsorship.

The Beresheet spacecraft, whose name means "Genesis" in Hebrew, was launched in February by SpaceX. Among the accomplishments achieved by SpaceIL was making Israel only the fifth nation to place a spacecraft in lunar orbit.

(Information provided by SpaceIL. Image from file)

FMI: www.spaceil.com