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An Israeli private company, SpaceIL, announced Tuesday, July 10, 2018 that it planned to launch a spacecraft for the first time to the Moon. If all goes according to plan, this 585-kilo ship will be launched in December 2018 by a SpaceX rocket, and will land on the moon on February 13, 2019, organizers said at a press conference in Yehud, close to Tel Aviv. The ship will take off without an astronaut, but with a robotic craft on board. Once on the Moon, he will have to investigate the lunar magnetic field. The collected data will be transmitted to the control center of Israel Aerospace Indutries (IAI) for two days before its system stops working.
An old project never abandoned
In 2007, Google had launched a price (Google Lunar XPtice) which offered $ 30 million in awards to encourage scientists and entrepreneurs to develop missions to the moon at a relatively low cost. Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub, three young Israeli scientists decided to run for office. "We met in a pub and we started discussing" remembers Kfir Damari. The trio constituted SpaceIL. They partnered with IAI, the largest Israeli public group, to design a very small vessel capable of landing on the Moon in 2013. "As we moved forward in the project and people joined us , we understood its complexity " added Kfir Damari
Unexpected funding
In January 2018, Google announced that the prize will not be awarded because none of the five finalist teams were in able to reach the moon before March 31, deadline. But young scientists have persevered. It was then that an important figure crossed the road of SpaceIL: the Israeli billionaire of South-African origin Morris Kahn. "I thought it was a big idea and I asked them: Do you have any money?" told Morris Khan. "They did not really think about the financial side of the operation". The billionaire first gave them $ 100,000 in aid, and then his contribution grew steadily to the point of financing most of the $ 95 million project. A relatively low-cost lunar project compared to the cost estimates of the Apollo mission, which was the source of the first men on the moon in 1969 and is close to $ 150 billion.
For Morris Khan, the fact that Israel reaches the moon, like the United States, Russia and China, would be "an enormous success" which "will give us a sense of pride that we really need".
"The future of humanity is in space"
"Conquering space is not only a means of proving its technological capabilities but also an urgent need for the human species that is rapidly squandering the Earth's natural resources " notes IAI Director General Yossi Weiss. "We must think of relief plans, the Earth is shrinking and the future of humanity is in space" he believes. The mission is supposed to stimulate the scientific curiosity of the young people. "We try to reproduce the effect that Apollo had in the United States," explains Morris Kahn, in reference to the popularity of the American program. "Children are said to be excited about space, robots, dinosaurs … With our robotic spacecraft we have two themes" smiles Kfir Damari. "When we talk about the project to children, we see stars in their eyes."
According to him, this project marks a turning point for the Israeli space industry, so far focused on security related projects, including satellite launches. The Israeli project, which has not received public support, could also encourage other private initiatives to launch into space. Send a spacecraft to the moon at a reasonable cost, "it will show the way to the rest of the world" predicts Ofer Doron, chief of IAI Space Division
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