[SpaceNews] SpaceIL completes lunar lander for February launch

[Orionid]

SpaceIL completes lunar lander for February launch
by Jeff Foust — December 18, 2018


A digital "time capsule" is installed on the SpaceIL lunar lander in a Dec. 17 ceremony marking the completion of the spacecraft. Credit: IAI

WASHINGTON — A privately funded Israeli lunar lander originally built for a prize competition is now complete and ready for launch in early 2019.

In a Dec. 17 ceremony at an Israel Aerospace Industries facility, workers installed the final, symbolic element of the SpaceIL spacecraft: a digital “time capsule” consisting of three discs containing information about the mission and Israel. The 600-kilogram lander is now complete and ready for shipment to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for launch.

“Inserting the discs into the spacecraft, which is a real ‘time capsule,’ indicates the spacecraft’s readiness to blast off from the launch site in a few weeks,” said Ido Anteby, chief executive of SpaceIL, in a statement.

The lander, recently named Beresheet, the Hebrew word for “Genesis,” will soon be shipped to Florida where it will launch in early 2019 as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission whose primary payload will be the PSN-6 communications satellite. That launch is currently scheduled for mid-February.

Once released into a supersynchronous transfer orbit, the lander will use its own propulsion to travel to the moon. The spacecraft will land about two months after launch. If successful, it will be the first non-governmental spacecraft to land on the moon.

SpaceIL originally developed the lander to compete for the now-defunct Google Lunar X Prize, which offered a $20 million grand prize to the first private team to land a spacecraft on the moon, move at least 500 meters across the surface and collect images and other data. SpaceIL relied largely on philanthropic funding to build the lander, a one-off mission intended to stimulate interest in science and engineering among Israeli students.

However, IAI, responsible for building the spacecraft, has more recently shown an interest in using that platform for future missions. “When I started out, I thought it was a one-time thing,” said Opher Doron, vice president and general manager of IAI’s space division, in a September interview. “Now there’s renewed interest in the moon, and we’ve got a lunar lander. There might be some business in going to the moon.”

Doron reiterated that interest in the statement about completing the lander. “There is no doubt that the technological knowledge acquired by IAI during the development and construction of Beresheet, together with SpaceIL and combined with the space capabilities developed over more than 30 years at IAI, puts us at the global forefront in the ability to complete lunar missions,” he said.

NASA has been working to stimulate development of small commercial landers with its Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, where it buys payload space on commercial landers. However, IAI and SpaceIL are not directly eligible for those awards since NASA requires the prime contractors to be based in the United States.

NASA, though, did sign an agreement with the Israel Space Agency Oct. 3 to offer other support for the SpaceIL mission. NASA has given SpaceIL a laser retroreflector for the lander to support laser ranging experiments. NASA will provide communications support through the Deep Space Network and images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which NASA is offering to other international and commercial landers.

In return, SpaceIL will share data with NASA collected by a magnetometer instrument on the lander provided by the Weizmann Institute of Science intended to measure the magnetic field at the landing site.

Source: https://spacenews.com/spaceil-completes-lunar-lander-for-february-launch/

[Orionid]

Israeli moon lander prepared for launch
February 21, 2019 Stephen Clark [Spaceflight Now]


The completed SpaceIL Beresheet lunar lander is pictured with its solar panels attached. Credit: SpaceIL

The privately-funded Israeli Beresheet lunar lander is ready for its historic mission to the moon, aiming to become the first space probe to land on another planetary body without government funding.

Funded by philanthropists and donors, the Beresheet lunar lander is set for launch Feb. 21 as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. A non-profit group named SpaceIL spearheaded the project.

“This is going to be the first private interplanetary mission that’s going to go to the moon,” said Yonatan Winetraub, a co-founder of SpaceIL, which had its origin in a brainstorming meeting in a Tel Aviv bar. “This is a big milestone. This is going to be the first time that it’s not going to be a superpower that’s going to go to the moon. This is a huge step for Israel.

“Until today, three superpowers have soft landed on the moon — the United States, the Soviet Union and recently, China,” Winetraub said in a news conference Wednesday night in Orlando. “And (we) thought it’s about time for a change. We want to get little Israel all the way to the moon. This is the purpose of SpaceIL.”

Beresheet, which means “genesis” or “in the beginning” in Hebrew, will attempt landing on the moon April 11, targeting a propulsive touchdown on four legs in the Mare Serenitatis region in the moon’s northern hemisphere.

The robotic lander, made up of four legs, avionics, computers and thrusters, will take a circuitous route to the moon. Covered in gold insulation, nearly three-quarters of the spacecraft’s 1,290-pound (585-kilogram) launch mass is propellant.

The hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants will feed a 100-pound-thrust main engine adapted from communications satellite buses, along with eight control jets to keep the Beresheet lander properly pointed.

About a half-hour after liftoff from Cape Canaveral, the Falcon 9 rocket will release the Beresheet lander into an egg-shaped orbit ranging more than 37,000 miles (60,000 kilometers) above Earth. A series of maneuvers will gradually raise the craft’s orbit to reach the moon’s distance nearly a quarter-million miles (400,000 kilometers) away.

A critical capture maneuver April 4 will allow Beresheet to swing into an elliptical orbit around the moon, setting up for the landing scheduled for April 11.

“Israel is a very small country, as small as New Jersey, and we’re shooting for the moon,” said Yigal Harel, head of SpaceIL’s spacecraft development team. “It’s the first time a small country has aimed to reach the moon and land safely. We are the first non-governmental mission to the moon, and we’re the first ever moon mission to use a commercial launch, which is very unique.”

Originally conceived as a competitor for the Google Lunar X Prize, the SpaceIL lunar lander was manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries, an Israeli defense contractor, and delivered to Cape Canaveral in January for the rideshare launch on the Falcon 9 rocket.

The Google Lunar X Prize, which promised a multimillion-dollar cash payout to the first team that put a privately-funded spacecraft on the moon, ended last year without a winner.

Morris Kahn, an Israeli billionaire, put $40 million of his fortune toward the mission, and serves as SpaceIL’s president. Other donors include Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, a casino and resort magnate who lives in Las Vegas, and Sylvan Adams, a Canadian-Israeli businessman.

The financial backers decided to keep SpaceIL going after the Google Lunar X Prize ended.

“We have a vision to show off Israel’s best qualities to the entire world,” Adams said Wednesday. “Tiny Israel, tiny, tiny Israel, is about to become the fourth nation to land on the moon. And this is a remarkable thing, because we continue to demonstrate our ability to punch far, far, far above our weight, and to show off our skills, our innovation, our creativity in tackling any difficult problem that could possibly exist.”

“We’ve been at it for six, seven, or eight years low-key, and for about four years at full rate,” said Opher Doron, general manager of IAI’s space division. “That’s what it took to develop the spacecraft. So it’s a new business model, and it’s a totally new way of getting to the moon.”

Because of the project’s limited budget — a fraction of the cost of government-funded lunar landers — the Israeli team had to adapt technology designed for other purposes to the moon mission. For example, the main thruster on the lander is an off-the-shelf engine typically used to adjust the orbits of large communications satellites.


The Beresheet mission will be deployed into an elliptical orbit around the Earth by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, then use its own engine to raise its altitude over the course of several weeks before reaching the moon April 4. Landing is scheduled for April 11. Credit: SpaceIL

The engine can’t be throttled, so it will fire in short bursts — as needed — to control the lander’s descent rate, before shutting off around 16 feet (5 meters) above the moon, allowing the probe to fall to the surface.

“It’s extremely exciting, and quite risky,” Doron said in an interview with Spaceflight Now. “There’s no guarantee of success. There never is in space, but there’s even less so in this case. But we’ve done a lot of testing, a lot of engineering, and now we’ll be doing a lot of praying.

“We have to live in space for a month-and-a-half without redundancies,” Doron said. “That’s never trivial, when we have so many new systems on-board. But the riskiest part is the lunar capture, and by far the riskiest is the landing itself. We’ll be doing more than a week in lunar orbit. We will raise our apogee until we get to the distance of the moon, and we have to time that so that when the moon is crossing our plane, that’s when we get there. We have to time our orbit-raising maneuvers so that when the moon is at that spot, we get there as well.”

“What we are trying to do here is take $100 million and put a few kilograms on the moon, but we are doing it at a certain level of reliability, which we currently don’t know,” Harel said. “For sure, it’s not 100 percent. This mission is very, very ambitious.”

“I think it’s an extraordinary success right where we stand right now,” Doron said. “We have designed and built and shipped a spacecraft ready to launch on the way to the moon. As someone from NASA told me, even if we don’t make it, we’ll be the first ones to figure out what went wrong and try to fix it.”

If the touchdown is successful, Beresheet will collect data on the magnetic field at the landing site. NASA also provided a laser reflector on the spacecraft, which scientists will use to determine the exact distance to the moon. The U.S. space agency is also providing communications and tracking support to the mission.

The German space agency — DLR — also helped the SpaceIL team with drop testing to simulate the conditions the spacecraft will encounter at the moment of landing.


SpaceIL co-founders Kfir Damari, Yonatan Winetraub and Yariv Bash insert a time capsule on the Beresheet spacecraft. The time capsule includes three discs with digital files that will remain on the moon with the spacecraft. The discs include details on the spacecraft and the crew that built it, and national and cultural symbols, such as the Israeli flag, the Israeli national anthem, and the Bible. Credit: SpaceIL

But Doron said the Beresheet spacecraft is largely home-grown, with Israeli designers, builders and operators.

“When you zoom out a little bit and you remember what the Google Lunar X Prize — rest in peace — wanted to achieve, we’ve actually achieved it,” Doron said. “We’re actually managing to do what they wanted to show was possible, a non-government mission to get to the moon.”

The Israeli-built lander is designed to function at least two days on the moon, enough time to beam back basic scientific data and a series of panoramic images, plus a selfie. The laser reflector is a passive payload, and will be useful long after the spacecraft stops operating.

Beresheet also aims to deliver a time capsule to the moon with the Israeli flag, and digital copies of the Israeli national anthem, the Bible, and other national and cultural artifacts.

“People say during the ’60s, Russia and the United States landed on the moon, so what’s the big deal now?” Harel said. “The tooling of development changed a lot, but the physics of nature is still very harsh and very, very complex, and to take something so tiny and so fragile and to put it on the moon is a very complex and ambitious mission. So we have redundancy only on things we decided must have it, but most of the systems have no redundancy.

“We need to be creative, when we encounter problems — and for sure, we will encounter problems because this is the space arena — we will have to send commands to the software of the spacecraft to do things differently.”

IAI and OHB, a German aerospace company, signed an agreement in January that could build on the Beresheet mission by constructing future commercial landers to ferry scientific instruments and other payloads to the moon’s surface for the European Space Agency.


Artist’s concept of the Beresheet lunar lander on the moon’s surface. Credit: SpaceIL

According to Doron, IAI is also in discussions with U.S. companies to use Israeli technology developed for the Beresheet project on commercial lunar landers for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program. NASA selected nine companies last year to be eligible to compete for contracts to transport science and tech demo payloads to the lunar surface.

SpaceIL and IAI were not among the winners, but Israeli engineers could partner with U.S. firms to meet NASA’s requirements.

“There may be opportunities in the United States,” Doron said. “There’s the CLPS program in the United States, and we are talking to different U.S. companies about how we can join in that.”

The Indonesian Nusantara Satu communications satellite, built by SSL in Palo Alto, California, will be the primary passenger on the Falcon 9 launcher when it blasts off during a 32-minute window opening at 8:45 p.m. EST Thursday (0145 GMT Friday). A U.S. Air Force satellite, known as S5, will also ride piggyback on an adapter attached to Nusantara Satu.

The entire spacecraft stack weighs about 10,700 pounds (4,850 kilograms), according to SSL, which sold some of capacity it purchased on the Falcon 9 rocket to Spaceflight, a company that offers rideshare launch opportunities to small satellites that do not require the full capability of a large rocket.

Spaceflight booked contracts with SpaceIL and the U.S. Air Force to give the Beresheet lander and the S5 space surveillance satellite rides into space. The launch marks the first rideshare to a geostationary-type orbit for Spaceflight, which until now has launch smallsats into low Earth orbits a few hundred miles above the planet.

While Beresheet will separate from the multi-satellite stack Falcon 9 soon after launch, the Air Force’s S5 smallsat will remain attached to the Nusantara Satu spacecraft until it reaches an orbit near geostationary altitude, where S5 will deploy to begin its mission.

Nusantara Satu will then continue to its final orbital position in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 35,000 kilometers) over the equator to begin a 15-year telecommunications mission over Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/02/21/israeli-moon-lander-prepared-for-launch/

[Orionid]

SpaceX launches satellites, moon mission on Falcon 9
by Caleb Henry — February 21, 2019 [Spacenews]


A Falcon 9 lifted off Feb. 21 with a 4,100-kilogram communications satellite, a 600-kilogram lunar lander and a 60-kilogram experimental smallsat. Credit: Jordan Sirokie for SpaceNews.

WASHINGTON — A SpaceX Falcon 9 carrying an Indonesian communications satellite, an Israeli lunar lander and a U.S. Air Force smallsat launched Feb. 21 from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The Falcon 9 lifted off at 8:45 p.m. Eastern, deploying the Beresheet lunar lander 33 minutes later, and the Nusantara Satu telecom satellite with the S5 experimental smallsat nearly 45 minutes after liftoff.

SpaceX landed the first-stage booster close to nine minutes after liftoff on the drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You,” in the Atlantic Ocean. It was the third mission for the booster, which first flew in July with 10 Iridium Next communications satellites and again in October with a radar satellite for the Argentine space agency CONAE.

SpaceX described the booster recovery — its 34th — as facing “some of the most challenging reentry conditions to date.”

SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted after the landing that the booster survived the “Highest reentry heating to date.” Musk added that SpaceX will use the booster for a fourth time in April for the Crew Dragon in-flight abort test.

U.S. satellite manufacturer Space Systems Loral, a Maxar company, purchased the Falcon 9 launch on behalf of its customer Pasifik Satelit Nusantara, or PSN. While most Falcon 9 missions to geostationary transfer orbit carry just one satellite at a time, PSN sought co-passengers in order to lower the cost of launching its Nusantara Satu satellite, formerly known as PSN-6. Space Systems Loral took on that responsibility, signing up rideshare broker Spaceflight Inc. of Seattle, Washington, which then secured Israel’s 600-kilogram Beresheet lander and the Air Force Research laboratory’s 60-kilogram S5 smallsat.

The launch was SpaceX’s second of the year, following a January launch for low-Earth-orbit satellite operator Iridium.

Israel headed to the moon

Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL’s Beresheet lander separated 33 minutes after liftoff. The lander, whose name is Hebrew for “Genesis,” began a two month journey to the moon using its own propulsion.

SpaceIL was originally building the Beresheet lander for the Google Lunar X Prize, but continued on with the lander after the contest ended in March 2018 without a winner for the $20 million award.

By reaching the moon, Beresheet will make Israel the fourth country to reach the moon, following the United States, Russia and China. It will also be the first non-governmental spacecraft to reach the moon.

SpaceIL’s mission for the lander is to beam back photos and video, and to measure the magnetosphere. The lander will use a thruster from Norwegian supplier Nammo to reach the moon, and to conduct a 500-meter “hop” to another location on the lunar surface. SpaceIL will attempt the lunar landing April 11.

Israel’s state-owned satellite manufacturer Israel Aerospace Industries built the Beresheet lander. The company, inspired by SpaceIL’s lunar ambitions, has developed commercial ambitions of its own regarding the moon. Last month Israel Aerospace Industries partnered with German spacecraft builder OHB to offer a version of the lander it built for SpaceIL to the European Space Agency for commercial delivery of payloads to the moon’s surface.

PSN connecting Indonesia

Nusantara Satu is a 4,100-kilogram communications satellite equipped with C- and Ku-band transponders, mainly for broadband connectivity. The satellite’s name translates to “One Archipelago,” referencing PSN’s home country and primary market of Indonesia, which consists of more than 17,000 islands. SSL built the satellite with chemical and electrical propulsion.

In an interview this week, PSN CEO Adi Rahman Adiwoso said the operator has been leasing capacity on roughly half a dozen other spacecraft and borrowing AsiaSat-3S, a nearly 20-year-old satellite from Hong Kong-based AsiaSat, to provide communications services across the Indonesia.

Adiwoso said 70 to 75 percent of Nusantara Satu’s capacity is already spoken for, half of it for the Indonesian government and roughly a quarter for other customers, many of which PSN will transfer off of other operator’s spacecraft. He said PSN anticipates using Nusantara Satu to connect around 5 million people through Wi-Fi hotspots by the end of this year.

Air Force experiment gets going

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s S5 satellite will travel with the Nusantara Satu satellite close to geostationary orbit before deploying from the parent satellite. SSL is using an approach honed during a secret DARPA experiment last year that carried a smallsat into orbit aboard the geostationary communications satellite Hispasat-30W-6.

S5, built by Blue Canyon Technologies of Boulder, Colorado, is designed to study the space environment, evaluating if low-cost satellites can improve knowledge of objects in geostationary orbit 36,000 kilometers above the Earth.

Source: https://spacenews.com/spacex-launches-satellites-moon-mission-on-falcon-9/

[Orionid]

SpaceIL back on course for the moon after computer glitch
by Jeff Foust — March 1, 2019 [SpaceNews]


SpaceIL's Beresheet lander, seen here during pre-launch preparations, raised its orbit Feb. 28 after a computer glitch postponed a planned maneuver earlier in the week. Credit: IAI

ORLANDO — A privately-funded Israeli lunar lander performed a maneuver Feb. 28 to raise its orbit after a computer problem postponed an earlier maneuver.

The Beresheet lander fired its main thruster for about four minutes at 2:30 p.m. Eastern. The maneuver raised the apogee of the spacecraft’s orbit around the Earth from 69,400 to 131,000 kilometers.

“The maneuver was conducted as expected. All the systems of the spacecraft worked properly,” Ido Anteby, chief executive of SpaceIL, said after the maneuver in an audio statement provided by SpaceIL.

Beresheet was placed into its initial supersynchronous transfer orbit Feb. 21, launching as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Florida. The spacecraft performed its first post-launch maneuver Feb. 24 to raise the perigee of its orbit to 600 kilometers.

The spacecraft was originally scheduled to perform the maneuver to raise its apogee Feb. 25, but SpaceIL said that the onboard computers on Beresheet suffered an unexpected reset, cancelling the maneuver.

“We’ve managed to find our way around several problems that we had over these last few days,” said Opher Doron, general manager of the space division at Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), who built the lander. “It’s quite normal for a new spacecraft to have some teething problems in its first days, and we’ve overcome them all.”

Doron described the computer issue as “small glitches that were solved by commands in the software” rather than a hardware issue. “It’s nothing that’s very serious. It just takes time to iron them out.”

Additional maneuvers are planned in the coming weeks to further raise the spacecraft’s orbit until it arrives at the vicinity of the moon in early April. Beresheet will then go into orbit around the moon ahead of a landing attempt April 11. Anteby said the next maneuver will be in about a week.

SpaceIL originally developed the lander to compete for the Google Lunar X Prize, which for a decade offered a $20 million first prize to the first privately-funded team to land a spacecraft on the moon, travel at least 500 meters across its surface and return video and other data. Google ended its sponsorship of the prize in early 2018 without a winner.

SpaceIL decided to continue development of its lander, funded largely through philanthropy, to continue its mission to encourage Israeli children to pursue careers in science and engineers. IAI, meanwhile, is planning to offer the lander for other customers, and announced in January an agreement with German company OHB to pursue opportunities with the European Space Agency.

Doron said that while Beresheet is performing well, he would not be surprised if there are other technical problems in the weeks ahead. “There are many things that cannot be tested on Earth,” he said. “There will probably be some more surprises along the way, and hopefully manage to deal with them as well.”

“We are quite happy” with the spacecraft in general, he noted. “The moon seems to be getting within reach.”

https://spacenews.com/spaceil-back-on-course-for-the-moon-after-computer-glitch/

[Orionid]

Maneuver puts SpaceIL lander on course for the moon
by Jeff Foust — March 19, 2019 [SpaceNews]


SpaceIL's Beresheet lander, seen here during pre-launch preparations, is on track to enter orbit around the moon in early April after a maneuver March 19. Credit: IAI

THE WOODLANDS, Texas — SpaceIL’s lunar lander performed a maneuver March 19 that puts the privately developed lander on course to enter orbit around the moon next month.

SpaceIL said its Beresheet lander performed a one-minute burn of its main thruster at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, extending the apogee of its orbit around the earth to 405,000 kilometers. The spacecraft is “functioning as expected,” the organization said in a statement.

Opher Doron, general manager of the space division of Israel Aerospace Industries, which built the lander for SpaceIL, said a few smaller maneuvers to optimize the trajectory are scheduled for the coming days, but no major burns before arriving at the moon. “We are on the way to the moon very successfully right now.”

Beresheet is on track to arrive at the vicinity of the moon April 4, going into orbit around it. A landing in the Mare Serenitatis region of the moon is scheduled for April 11.

Doron said recent maneuvers have not been affected by problems with the star trackers on the spacecraft that have not worked as expected because of interference with sunlight. “We’ve learned to deal with the difficulties we’ve been having with the star trackers, and what that entails in maneuvering the spacecraft in a non-nominal fashion,” he said.

Another issue has been radiation-induced upsets of the lander’s computer. One such glitch forced the mission to postpone an earlier maneuver while it diagnosed the problem. “No one really did the mission analysis of how critical those few minutes would be,” said Meir Nissim Nir, director of advanced space systems at IAI, during a presentation at the Microsymposium 60 meeting here March 17 about commercial lunar landers. “We had to reconfigure mission rules and update [software] patches.”

The computer and star tracker issues have made the journey to the moon more difficult than anticipated. “This looping orbit is supposed to be the easiest way,” he said. “It became a very challenging mission.”

The challenges will grow next month when Beresheet attempts that landing, Nir said. The lander will be “landing blind,” he said, relying on laser rangefinders and a Doppler radar system.

While SpaceIL originally developed the lander as a one-off mission in a bid to win the now-defunct Google Lunar X Prize, IAI is looking ahead to commercial applications of the spacecraft. The company announced a partnership with German company OHB in January to offer commercial lunar payload delivery services, initially for ESA.

Nir said the company is looking for other customers. “We’re taking the lander to market,” he said. IAI is planning “slight modifications” to the Beresheet design, particularly to the upper deck of the lander, enabling it to support payloads weighing 30 to 60 kilograms, depending on the orbit the lander is initially launched into. That lander would be ready for missions starting as soon as the end of 2020.

IAI is not directly eligible for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, since that requires spacecraft be built in the United States. Nir said IAI was talking with several American companies about teaming arrangements that would allow the lander to be built in the U.S. and become eligible for future rounds of the program. “That’s a viable opportunity,” he said.

Future versions of the lander, he said, will incorporate precision landing technologies as well as the ability to hop across the surface from one site to another. The lander was originally designed to hop in order to meet an X Prize requirement to travel at least 500 meters across the surface, but SpaceIL decided not to pursue that for this mission after the prize expired.

Source: https://spacenews.com/maneuver-puts-spaceil-lander-on-course-for-the-moon/

[Orionid]

SpaceIL lander enters lunar orbit
by Jeff Foust — April 4, 2019 [Spacenews]


A six-minute burn by the main engine on Beresheet, highlighted in red above, inserted the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit around the moon. Credit: SpaceIL

WASHINGTON — SpaceIL announced April 4 that its Beresheet spacecraft has entered orbit around the moon, setting the stage for a landing attempt in a week.

The lander fired its main engine for six minutes starting at 10:18 a.m. Eastern time, slowing the spacecraft down by about 1,000 kilometers per hour, enough for it to be captured into orbit around the moon. SpaceIL said in a statement that that maneuver went as expected, putting the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit with a perilune of 500 kilometers and apolune of 10,000 kilometers.

“After six weeks in space, we have succeeded in overcoming another critical stage by entering the moon’s gravity,” said Ido Anteby, chief executive of SpaceIL, in a statement. “We still have a long way until the lunar landing, but I’m convinced our team will complete the mission to land the first Israeli spacecraft on the moon, making us all proud.”

Beresheet launched Feb. 21 as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, which released the spacecraft into an elliptical orbit around the Earth. The spacecraft subsequently performed a series of maneuvers to raise the apogee of its orbit to more than 400,000 kilometers. That put the spacecraft on a trajectory to approach the moon and, after this latest maneuver, enter orbit around it.

Beresheet will later move into a circular orbit 200 kilometers high in preparation for its landing attempt, scheduled for April 11. The spacecraft will try to touch down softly on Mare Serenitatis, or Sea of Serenity, in the northern hemisphere of the near side of the moon.

If successful, Israel will become only the fourth nation to make a soft landing on the moon, after the former Soviet Union, the United States and China. Israel is the seventh nation to orbit the moon, counting the three nations that have landed as well as India, Japan and the European Space Agency.

The $100 million project started as an effort by a small organization, SpaceIL, to win the Google Lunar X Prize while also stimulating interest in science and engineering among Israeli students. With funding largely from philanthropic sources, SpaceIL contracted with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to build the lander. That work continued even though the $20 million grand prize in the competition expired a year ago when sponsor Google declined to grant another extension.

“Even before Beresheet was launched, it already was a national success story that shows our groundbreaking technological capabilities,” said Nimrod Sheffer, chief executive of IAI, in the statement. The company is offering versions of the Beresheet lander for other customers, and announced an agreement with German company OHB in January to study its use for future ESA missions.

Even though the Google Lunar X Prize has expired, SpaceIL could win a consolation prize. The X Prize Foundation announced March 28 that it will award a $1 million “Moonshot Prize” to SpaceIL if Beresheet successfully lands on the moon.

Source: https://spacenews.com/spaceil-lander-enters-lunar-orbit/

[Orionid]

SpaceIL says “chain of events” led to crash of lunar lander
by Jeff Foust — April 12, 2019, Updated April 14. [SN]


Part of the final image returned by SpaceIL's Beresheet lunar lander before it crashed into the lunar surface April 11. Credit: SpaceIL

WASHINGTON — As SpaceIL continues its investigation into its failed lunar landing attempt April 11, its backers as well as others in the space community remain optimistic about efforts to privately develop such spacecraft despite technical challenges.

In an April 12 statement, SpaceIL said a technical problem in an unspecified component triggered a “chain of events” that shut down the Beresheet lander’s main engine during its descent to the lunar surface, dooming the mission.

That initial problem took place when Beresheet was at an altitude of 14 kilometers. The statement doesn’t discuss the specific issue or others that led to the engine malfunction, but during the webcast from mission control officials mentioned at one point a problem with an inertial measurement unit on the lander.

The lander was able to restart its main engine, according to the statement, but “by that time, its velocity was too high to slow down and the landing could not be completed as planned.” Telemetry was lost permanently from the lander at an altitude of 150 meters, showing the spacecraft was descending at 500 kilometers per hour, far too fast for a soft landing.

SpaceIL said that “comprehensive tests” are planned for next week to better understand the events that led to the failed landing, but didn’t give a timetable for releasing more details about the cause of the landing.

SpaceIL, a non-profit organization funded primarily philanthropically, initially planned to build a very small lander as a competitor in the Google Lunar X Prize. The spacecraft grew in size and cost over time, resulting in a spacecraft weighing nearly 600 kilograms at launch and with a total cost of about $100 million.

Both SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), the company that built Beresheet for SpaceIL, received widespread praise for coming very close to a successful landing. “Every attempt to reach new milestones holds opportunities for us to learn, adjust and progress,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement after the failed landing. “I have no doubt that Israel and SpaceIL will continue to explore and I look forward to celebrating their future achievements.”

“This is a tremendous technological achievement for the State of Israel, which is now among only seven superpowers who have reached this close to the moon,” said Harel Locker, chairman of IAI, in a statement. “This project lasted eight years and contributed significantly to the Israeli space industry, which today became one of the leading space industries in the world.”

The failure, though, does emphasize the technical challenges of getting to the moon, an issue that looms over other companies planning similar feats. This includes the nine companies participating in NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Of those nine companies, only one, Lockheed Martin, has extensive experience in developing lander missions, although a second company, Draper, has heritage dating back to the Apollo lunar landers. The others are dominated by startups that, in most cases, have yet to launch any spacecraft into space, let alone develop a lander.

When NASA announced the CLPS program last year, agency officials emphasized that they understood the risks and that not every mission would be successful. “Our hope is to take one or two shots on goal every year,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, at a meeting of the Space Studies Board last May. “A reasonable expectation is a 50 percent success rate at the beginning. It’s not zero, and it’s not 100.”

“Space is hard, but worth the risks. If we succeeded every time, there would be no reward,” Zurbuchen tweeted after the failed Beresheet landing. He congratulated SpaceIL for coming close to a landing, and said he would visit Israel later this year to discuss potential future cooperation. “We’re looking forward to future opportunities to explore the Moon together.”

SpaceIL originally intended Beresheet to be a one-time mission, with a goal not to enable a sustainable commercial business of missions to the moon but instead to inspire Israeli students to pursue science and engineering careers. However, IAI has said it’s interested in future commercial opportunities for landers based on Beresheet, including an agreement in January with German company OHB to study the use of such landers for future European Space Agency missions.

Meir Nissim Nir, director of advanced space systems at IAI, said at the Microsymposium 60 lunar exploration workshop last month outside Houston that those landers could be ready for missions as soon as late 2020 if contracts were signed soon and the work done in Israel. He also said the company was looking at potential American partners that would make the company eligible for future rounds of the CLPS program, which requires landers to be built in the United States.

“We are now speaking with several groups about teaming up and doing it from the States,” he said. “This will, of course, take a little bit longer, but that’s a viable opportunity.”

Among those who were in SpaceIL mission control to observe the landing was Benjamin Netanyahu, who was reelected earlier in the week for another term as prime minister of Israel. “If at first you don’t succeed, you try again,” he said in remarks after the failed landing, suggesting another mission, financed this time by the Israeli government, might be flown in the next few years.

In a statement April 13, Morris Kahn, the billionaire chairman of SpaceIL who contributed more than $40 million towards the development of Beresheet, said the organization would build a “Beresheet 2” lander. “We’re going to put it on the moon and we’re going to complete the mission,” he said. A task force would meet to start planning for the mission April 14. He gave no other details about the mission, including its cost and funding sources.

Source: https://spacenews.com/spaceil-says-chain-of-events-led-to-crash-of-lunar-lander/

[Orionid]

Israeli probe crashes in attempt to become first privately-funded moon lander
April 11, 2019 Stephen Clark [SFN]


This image was taken by Beresheet at an altitude of 13.7 miles (22 kilometers) above the moon and relayed to mission controllers through NASA’s Deep Space Network. Credit: SpaceIL

An Israeli-built spacecraft seeking to become the first privately-developed probe to land on the moon crashed on descent Thursday, but the mission was widely lauded as a breakthrough for the commercial space industry, and Israeli prime minster Benjamin Netanyahu said the country would try again.

“We had a failure of the spacecraft,” said Opher Doron, general manager of the space division at Israel Aerospace Industries, which built the Beresheet moon lander. “We unfortunately have not managed to land successfully.

“We are the seventh country to orbit the moon, and the fourth to reach the moon’s surface, and it’s a tremendous achievement up to now,” Doron said.

Live telemetry from the Beresheet spacecraft, relayed to mission control in Yehud, Israel, through a NASA tracking antenna in Spain, indicated the lander ran into trouble around 1919 GMT (3:19 p.m. EDT), six minutes before its scheduled landing time, at an altitude of around 43,800 feet (13,350 meters).

Doron provided updates on the progress of Beresheet’s descent. Data from the spacecraft — about the size of a golf cart — indicated a problem in one of its inertial measurement units, a key part of the probe’s guidance system, Doron said.

Controllers briefly lost the signal from Beresheet, and when they regained telemetry, the data indicated Beresheet was rapidly falling toward the moon.

“We seem to have a problem with our main engine,” Doron said. “We are resetting the spacecraft to try to enable the engine.”

Moments later, a data display in mission control suggested Beresheet had crashed on the lunar surface at high speed at roughly 1923 GMT (3:23 p.m. EDT).

“Well, we didn’t make it, but we definitely tried, and I think that the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous,” said Morris Kahn, the president of SpaceIL who donated some $40 million of his fortune to the privately-funded lunar lander program. “I think we can be proud.”


Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu greeted the Beresheet control team shortly before the lunar landing attempt Thursday. Credit: SpaceIL

“If at first you don’t succeed, you try again,” said Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who observed the landing attempt from the control center.

Netanyahu said Israel could try to another moon landing mission in two years.

Beresheet began its descent at an altitude of about 15 miles (25 kilometers), roughly 500 miles (800 kilometers) from its targeted landing site, a few hundred kilometers from the location where the Apollo 15 astronauts landed in 1971.

The lander first switched on its laser landing sensors, which were designed to feed data about the craft’s altitude and descent rate to a guidance computer responsible for commanding firings of Beresheet’s main engine to control its speed.

Then Beresheet began pulsing its eight small control thrusters to get into the correct orientation to slow its speed and fall toward the moon, with its main engine facing in the direction of travel parallel to the lunar surface.

Beresheet’s main engine was a 100-pound-thrust (400-newton) LEROS 2b engine built by Nammo, formerly Moog, in the United Kingdom. The hydrazine-fueled engine was a modified version of a thruster typically used by large communications satellites.

But the engine had never been used for a landing on another planetary body, and engineers updated the engine’s design to allow for multiple “hot restarts,” when the lander will fire the engine in quick bursts to control its descent rate. The engine couldn’t be throttled to adjust Beresheet’s speed.

“The hot restarts represented a particular challenge as it effectively puts the engine into its most stressful temperature environment,” said Robert Westcott, one of Nammo’s lead propulsion engineers on the Beresheet project, before Thursday’s landing attempt. “To test this we performed a series of hotfire trials together with SpaceIL, where we stopped and started the engine repeatedly, which confirmed that it is able to operate in this highly demanding firing mode.”

Other changes to the engine included shortening its nozzle to ensure it could fit into the Beresheet spacecraft and keep the thruster from hitting the moon’s surface. Nammo also made the engine more powerful for Beresheet by increasing its thrust.

Data transmitted back to Earth from the spacecraft showed Beresheet started slowing its speed above the moon from roughly 3,800 mph (1.7 kilometers per second) around 1911 GMT (3:11 p.m. EDT).

If the spacecraft performed as expected, Beresheet should have reached a horizontal velocity of zero at an altitude of about 3,300 feet (1 kilometer). Beresheet would have then pitched over and started a vertical descent.

“Roughly 15 feet (5 meters) or so above the surface of the moon, the velocity will go to zero, and then we’ll just shut off the motors and the spacecraft will perform a free fall all the way to the surface of the moon,” said Yariv Bash, a SpaceIL co-founder, last week. “The legs of the spacecraft were designed to sustain that fall, and hopefully once we are on the moon we’ll be able to send back images and videos to Earth.”

After settling on the surface on its four landing legs, Beresheet was to take a series of pictures, including images for a panorama to show the probe’s surroundings. The lander was also be programmed to record a series of images during the landing sequence to create a video of the descent.

Beresheet’s sole active science instrument was a magnetometer developed by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel to measure the magnetism of lunar rocks.

The German space agency — DLR — also helped the SpaceIL team with drop testing to simulate the conditions the spacecraft will encounter at the moment of landing.

Despite landing failure, officials laud Beresheet’s groundbreaking mission

Beresheet, which means “genesis” or “in the beginning” in Hebrew, was aiming to become the first privately-funded spacecraft to land on another planetary body. The mission was developed for around $100 million by SpaceIL, a non-profit organization founded in 2011 by three young Israeli engineers.

Despite the probe’s failure, officials from NASA and the commercial space industry congratulated the Beresheet team for their achievement in getting the spacecraft so close to landing.

“While NASA regrets the end of the SpaceIL mission without a successful lunar landing of the Beresheet lander, we congratulate SpaceIL, the Israel Aerospace Industries and the state of Israel on the incredible accomplishment of sending the first privately funded mission into lunar orbit,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said in a statement.

“Every attempt to reach new milestones holds opportunities for us to learn, adjust and progress,” Bridenstine said. “I have no doubt that Israel and SpaceIL will continue to explore and I look forward to celebrating their future achievements.”

Thomas Zurbuchen, head of NASA’s science mission directorate, tweeted: “Space is hard, but worth the risks. If we succeeded every time, there would be no reward. It’s when we keep trying that we inspire others and achieve greatness.”

Zurbuchen said he will travel to Israel later this year for discussions on future cooperation on lunar missions. NASA provided a laser retroreflector and communications and tracking support for the Beresheet mission.


Artist’s concept of the Beresheet lander during its final descent to the moon. Credit: SpaceIL

“I want to thank @TeamSpaceIL for doing this landing with millions watching around the world, despite knowing the risks,” Zurbuchen tweeted. “We do the same because we believe in the value of worldwide exploration and inspiration. We encourage all international and commercial explorers to do the same!”

SpaceIL was founded to pursue the Google Lunar X Prize, which promised $20 million grand prize for the first team to land a privately-funded spacecraft on the moon, return high-definition imagery, and demonstrate mobility on the lunar surface.

The Google Lunar X Prize contest ended last year without a winner, but Beresheet’s backers kept the mission alive.

Kahn, a South African-born Israeli businessman, was the mission’s largest single contributor. Other donors included Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, a casino and resort magnate who lives in Las Vegas. IAI, the lander’s prime contractor, also invested some of its own internal research and development money into the program.

The Israeli Space Agency awarded SpaceIL around $2 million, the program’s only government funding.

The X Prize Foundation, which organized the original Google Lunar X Prize competition, announced March 28 that it would offer a $1 million “Moonshot Award” to SpaceIL if the Beresheet mission successfully landed on the moon.

Peter Diamandis, founder and executive chairman of the X Prize Foundation, announced Thursday that SpaceIL will get the $1 million Moonshot Award anyway. He tweeted that the award will help SpaceIL “continue their work and pursue Beresheet 2.0.”

“They managed to touch the surface of the moon, and that’s what we were looking for for our Moonshot Award,” said Anousheh Ansari, CEO of the X Prize Foundation.

“Besides touching the surface of the moon, they touched the lives and the hearts of an entire nation, the entire world,” Diamandis said. “These prizes are not easy, and frankly, space is not easy, not yet,” Diamandis said.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/04/11/israeli-probe-crashes-in-attempt-to-become-first-privately-funded-moon-lander/

[Orionid]

Errant command doomed Israeli moon lander, officials vow to try again
April 18, 2019 Stephen Clark [SFN]


A camera aboard the Israeli Beresheet lunar lander captured this picture of the moon from an altitude of 15 kilometers, or about 49,000 feet. Credit: SpaceILA command uplinked by mission control to resolve an error in the guidance system on the Israeli Beresheet moon lander inadvertently triggered a chain reaction that led to the shutdown of the probe’s main engine during descent to the lunar surface April 11, officials said this week.

An update Wednesday from SpaceIL, the Israeli non-profit organization that developed Beresheet, said engineers investigating the lander’s crash determined a manual command entered into the spacecraft’s computer sparked a series of events that doomed the mission.

Controllers at the mission’s ground station in Yehud, Israel, transmitted a command intended to fix a problem with the inertial measurement unit on the lander, a sensor which determined the craft’s orientation in space, according to a report published by the Jerusalem Post quoting Ido Anteby, SpaceIL’s CEO.

But the command had an unintended consequence, SpaceIL said.

“This led to a chain reaction in the spacecraft, during which the main engine switched off, which prevented it from activating further,” SpaceIL said in a written statement.

According to the preliminary investigation, the first technical issue occurred when Beresheet was 14 kilometers, or about 46,000 feet, above the moon. Without the main engine to slow its descent, Beresheet plummeted to the lunar surface.

Ground teams received the last data from the lander at an altitude of about 150 meters, or 492 feet. At that time, Beresheet was moving vertically at 500 kilometers per hour, or about 310 mph, toward a crash on the moon.

Beresheet, which means “genesis” or “in the beginning” in Hebrew, was aiming to become the first privately-funded spacecraft to land on the moon. On April 4, the mission became the first backed by a non-governmental organization to orbit the moon, and Israel became the seventh nation or space agency to successfully place a spacecraft into lunar orbit, after Russia, the United States, Japan, the European Space Agency, China and India.


Artist’s concept of the Beresheet lander during its final descent to the moon. Credit: SpaceIL

Teams from SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, which built the Beresheet lander, continue investigating the events that occurred during the April 11 landing attempt, “in order to understand the full picture of what occurred during the mission.” The final results of the investigation will be released in the coming weeks, officials said.

Officials acknowledged the risks of Beresheet’s landing attempt before the mission. The spacecraft was developed for roughly $100 million, a fraction of the cost of previous government-funded moon landing probes, without backup systems for many key components.

SpaceIL begins planning for Beresheet 2

While engineers continue examining what went wrong with the April 11 landing attempt, private donors and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have promised to try again.

Morris Kahn, SpaceIL’s president and Beresheet’s top financial backer, said April 13 that he intends to form a new group of donors to support a second Beresheet mission.

“We are actually going to build … a new spacecraft, we’re going to put it on the moon, and we are going to complete the mission,” Kahn said.

Kahn, an 89-year-old South African-born Israeli billionaire, contributed more than $40 million of his fortune to the first Beresheet mission.

“This is part of my message to the younger generation: Even if you do not succeed, you get up again and try,” Kahn said.

Speaking at the Beresheet mission control center moments after officials declared the landing attempt a failure, Netanyahu pledged another landing attempt within two years.

Founded in 2011 by three young engineers, SpaceIL attracted funding from billionaire entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and corporations, including millions of dollars in contributions in money and labor from IAI, Israel’s top aerospace contractor. The Israel Space Agency awarded SpaceIL $2 million, the Beresheet project’s only government funding.

SpaceIL originally intended to pursue the $30 million Google Lunar X Prize, which fostered a competition between international teams to land the first privately-funded spacecraft on the moon. The Google Lunar X Prize ended last year without a winner, but SpaceIL continued to develop their lunar lander.

The X Prize Foundation awarded SpaceIL a $1 million “Moonshot Award” after the Beresheet mission came close to achieving a successful landing last week.

“I am proud of SpaceIL’s team of engineers for their wonderful work and dedication, and such cases are an integral part of such a complex and pioneering project,” Kahn said. “What is important now is to learn the best possible lessons from our mistakes and bravely continue forward. That’s the message we’d like to convey to the people in Israel and the entire Jewish world. This is the spirit of the Beresheet project.”

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/04/18/errant-command-doomed-israeli-moon-lander-officials-vow-to-try-again/

[Orionid]

Firefly to build U.S. version of Israeli Beresheet lunar lander
July 10, 2019 Stephen Clark [SN]


Artist’s illustration of the Genesis lunar lander. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based company which is already developing a small satellite launcher, has signed an agreement with Israel Aerospace Industries to build lunar landers in the United States and carry NASA science instruments to the moon, officials announced Tuesday.

The agreement will permit Firefly to compete with other U.S. companies developing commercial lunar landers to deliver science instruments and other payloads to the lunar surface. Firefly is one of nine companies NASA selected last year to compete for contracts to carry research payloads to the moon through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program.

Firefly officials said the commercial lander will be based on the design of the Beresheet spacecraft built by IAI, which attempted to become the first privately-funded mission to achieve a soft landing on the moon in April.

Beresheet crashed during final descent April 11, but it became the first privately-funded spacecraft to orbit the moon on the way to failed landing attempt. The $100 million Beresheet mission was led by SpaceIL, an Israeli non-profit organization that raised funding from wealthy donors, along with financial and labor contributions from IAI, which built the spacecraft.

Firefly’s name for the U.S.-made lander, Genesis, honors the Israeli name Beresheet, which means “genesis” or “in the beginning” in Hebrew.

“Firefly is excited to partner with IAI in architecting a complete lunar science mission for NASA’s CLPS initiative,” said Tom Markusic, Firefly’s CEO, in a press release. “IAI’s culture of engineering innovation and bold vision make our partnership a perfect solution for America as the nation realizes its return to the moon.”

Headquartered in Cedar Park, Texas, Firefly is developing a liquid-fueled smallsat launcher named Alpha capable of delivering up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) into a low-altitude orbit.

An artist’s illustration released by Firefly on Tuesday shows a Genesis lander mounted on top of the company’s Beta rocket, the heavier of two launch vehicle configurations Firefly is developing, with three Alpha boosters connected together to form a single launcher.


Artist’s concept of a Genesis lander and Firefly’s Beta launcher. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

Earlier this year, Markusic said Firefly was assessing whether to design its own lunar lander, or partner with another company.

“This agreement with IAI will allow Firefly to build on our momentum and expand our lunar capabilities by creating a U.S.-built version of IAI’s historic lunar lander,” Markusic said in a statement. “Having access to flight proven lunar lander technology and the expertise of IAI engineers makes Firefly well placed to gain a foothold in the cislunar market.”

NASA selected the first three companies to win contracts through the CLPS program in May.

Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines and OrbitBeyond won contracts to fly NASA science instruments to the moon in 2020 and 2021. Firefly did not win a contract, but NASA plans additional competitions among the nine CLPS providers for more missions in the coming months and years.

In the announcement, Firefly touted the Beresheet design as “flight-proven.” The other companies eligible for CLPS contracts are developing landers that have not flown in space.

The Beresheet lunar lander launched as a secondary payload from Cape Canaveral on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in February, riding to space alongside an Indonesian communications satellite and a U.S. Air Force smallsat. The spacecraft weighed 1,290 pounds (585 kilograms) at the time of launch, and used its own propulsion to boost itself out of Earth orbit and into orbit around the moon, then commence the landing sequence April 11.

The Intellectual Property and Engineering Support Agreement announced Tuesday between Firefly and IAI will allow for the construction of Genesis landers in the United States. The companies did not specify a location of the Genesis lander manufacturing facility, and a Firefly spokesperson declined to provide additional details.

NASA requires the majority of CLPS lunar landers to be manufactured in the United States. Two other CLPS providers, OrbitBeyond and Draper, are developing lunar landers based on designs from Indian and Japanese teams that competed for the now-defunct Google Lunar X Prize.

SpaceIL also aimed to win the Google Lunar X Prize before the competition ended in 2018 without a winner. The Israeli team continued with the Beresheet mission.

“Firefly Aerospace is excited to partner with Israel Aerospace Industries to provide the only NASA CLPS program flight-proven lander design,” said Shea Ferring, Firefly’s vice president of mission assurance, in a statement. “NASA and the U.S. will greatly benefit from IAI’s next generation lander design, leveraging extensive Beresheet lander design and flight operations experience. Genesis, a predominately U.S.-built version of the lander, delivers a low-cost integrated solution for reliable lunar surface missions.”


The completed SpaceIL Beresheet lunar lander is pictured with its solar panels attached. Credit: SpaceIL

Firefly plans to initially launch its Alpha rocket from Space Launch Complex 2-West at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, a former Delta 2 launch pad. The company says the Alpha’s inaugural launch could happen in December, but is more likely to occur next year.

In February, Firefly announced an agreement with Space Florida to launch from the Complex 20 launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. Firefly also plans to build a rocket manufacturing facility at Exploration Park, just outside the gates of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, near factories already built by Blue Origin and OneWeb.

Firefly also has a production site in Briggs, Texas, to build Alpha launch vehicles.

“The experience gained in the Beresheet moon mission co-developed with SpaceIL puts IAI at the forefront of lunar lander technology and enables us to undertake additional lunar missions with proven technology and significant engineering experience and know-how,” said Boaz Levi, IAI’s executive vice president and general manager of the systems, missiles and space group. “We are proud to partner with Firefly Aerospace and offer NASA our experience in rapid and affordable lunar missions, including all lessons learned from the Beresheet endeavor.”

After the crash of Beresheet, SpaceIL initially said it would try again to achieve a lunar landing. But the non-profit said last month that those plans are changing.

“This time, we will not go to the moon,” SpaceIL tweeted June 25. “Beresheet’s journey to the moon was already received as a successful, record-breaking journey. Instead we will seek out another, significant objective for Beresheet 2.0. More details to follow…”

IAI officials said before Beresheet’s launch that they originally did not see much of a future for SpaceIL’s custom-designed lander design, beyond a single mission. But a market opened up for IAI after NASA and the European Space Agency looked at purchasing commercial rides to the moon for science experiments.

NASA hopes the CLPS program will foster a growing commercial market for lunar missions, advance scientific research, and help prove technologies and public-private partnership schemes for a human landing on the moon.

IAI and OHB, a German aerospace company, signed an agreement in January that could build on the Beresheet mission by constructing future commercial landers to ferry scientific instruments and other payloads to the moon’s surface for ESA.

And now IAI could have a role in supporting NASA’s lunar exploration goals.

Source: https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/07/10/firefly-to-build-u-s-version-of-israeli-beresheet-lunar-lander/