SpaceiL

SpaceIL is a nonprofit organization created to land the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon: the Beresheet lander.

SpaceIL began as part of the Google Lunar X Prize, which offered $30 million in prizes to inspire teams to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. The SpaceIL entry planned to meet the requirement to travel 500 meters on the lunar surface by having the lander hop, using rocket engine propulsion, from its landing site to another site more than 500 meters away.

The Beresheet mission also included plans to measure the moon's magnetic field at the landing site, and the lander carried a laser retroreflector and a time capsule containing analog and digital information created by the Arch Mission Foundation.

SpaceIL successfully launched the Beresheet lander in 2019, and it entered lunar orbit. However, during the landing procedure, communications with the spacecraft were lost for long enough that the braking process failed and the vehicle crashed on the lunar surface.

The Beresheet mission awarded Israel the prestige of becoming the seventh country to achieve lunar orbit and the fourth country ever to attempt a soft landing on the moon.