The Google Lunar XPRIZE was a contest that took place between 2007 and 2018. It was organized by the X Prize Foundation and it was sponsored by Google. The challenge was for a privately funded team to be the first to land a robotic spacecraft on the moon which would travel five hundred meters and send high-resolution video and images back to earth. The prize for the winner would be twenty million dollars. The contest was ended in early 2018. No team had been able to schedule, confirm and pay for a launch attempt.
SpaceIL is an Israeli nonprofit organization that was established in 2011. It was created in order to pursue the challenge of the Lunar XPRIZE. Even though the XPRIZE contest was cancelled in March of this year, SpaceIL is continuing its work on a lunar lander. They are building it in conjunction with Israel Aerospace Industries which is a company owned by the Israel government. So far, about ninety million dollars has been spent on the project. A great deal of that funding came from an Israeli billionaire businessman named Morris Khan.
The CEO of SpaceIL spoke at a press conference in Israeli last Tuesday. He said that the SpaceIL lunar probe would be the smallest ever sent to the Moon. The probe is about six and a half feet in diameter and about five feet high. It will weight about thirteen hundred pounds at launch. About four hundred pound of fuel will be burned ot reach the Moon.
The probe will land on the Moon and then take off again to land sixteen hundred feet away from the first landing site. This was one of the conditions of the XPRIZE challenge. The probe will be launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida this December on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It is expected to land on the Moon in February of 2019. It will plant an Israeli flag and also study the magnetic fields of the Moon.
If the SpaceIL mission is successful, Israel will be the fourth country to successfully land a probe on the surface of the Moon. The U.S. China and the Soviet Union have also landed probes on the Moon.
The SpaceIL CEO said that he hoped that a successful mission would create an “Apollo effect” for the next generation of Israel. This is a reference to the interest and enthusiasm created for science, technology, engineering and math by the Moon walk of Neil Armstrong in 1969. He said, “This is a tremendous project. When the rocket is launched into space, we will all remember where we were when Israel landed on the Moon.” The head of the IAI space division said that Israel was “going to show the way for the rest of the world” to send a spacecraft to the Moon at a reasonable cost.
Morris Khan, the businessman who funded much of the SpaceIL project said, “After eight challenging years, I am filled with pride that the first Israeli spacecraft, which is in its final construction and testing phases, will soon be making its way to the moon. The launch of the first Israeli spacecraft will fill Israel, in its 70th year, with pride.”