Meet the guys who sent the Israeli spacecraft to the moon – The front

Yariv Bash was not supposed to go on the moon. He was not supposed to go anywhere.

Just two years before the 39-year-old electronics engineer goes into history, bringing an Israeli spacecraft to the moon, he was injured so badly in a skiing accident that he was been paralyzed from the waist up. "No worries," he told his friends at the time. "We will first put a spaceship on the moon. Then we will repair my legs. "

Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub, as well as the founders of SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit organization, see themselves as "proud geeks". While drinking in bars in Tel Aviv, they wondered, "Why not go to the moon? Fourth time laying a spacecraft on the moon, they have been working since 2011 to build, finance, launch and land "Beresheet", with funding from Israel Aerospace Industries and private donations from South African-Israeli entrepreneur Morris Kahn. , Canadian-Israeli. real estate magnate Sylvan Adams and US casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

Does this tempt you? Beresheet is the least expensive space vehicle in history to reach the moon, with 100 million dollars.

But on Thursday, Beresheet crashed. After two months of almost seamless travel, when the spacecraft was only ten kilometers from the moon's surface, it suffered a malfunction of the engine and began an uncontrolled descent before collapsing on the surface of the moon. the moon.

"We're on the moon, but that's not what we wanted," a message from Beresheet's control room reached.

It may be a small step for the man, but it is a big step forward for Israel – the first privately financed satellite to reach the moon, the fourth in general, the cheapest and, of course, the only one created by Jewish scientists. .

In addition, we believe that Bash, Damari and Winetraub may be able to get rid of this disappointment. The three men are still in their thirties. Damari is co-founder of Metapacket, a high-tech enterprise security company.

Winetraub, who trained at NASA, helped SpaceIL develop an educational program that reached one million children. "We live in a time when these children will be able to make their own rockets, solve global warming or clean up the oceans or whatever they wish to do," he told From the Grapevine. He is determined that technology "catches their dreams". He also obtained a doctorate at Stanford, where he is working on a method of early detection of cancer.

And Bash? Bash is the CEO of Flytrex, whom he hopes to use "to make drone delivery as easy as using your iPhone".

The three men are not too defeated. As they like to say, "Apparently, it's sorcerer."

Watch Nas Daily tell the story of Beresheet:

Jenny Singer is the Assistant for Life and Reporting for the Forward Group. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny