Beresheet — first privately funded lunar landing attempt

On the evening of 11 April 2019, a control room in Yehud, Israel fell silent as a washing-machine-sized spacecraft began its descent toward Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood among the engineers. Beresheet, Hebrew for 'In the beginning,' was the work of SpaceIL, a nonprofit born from the Google Lunar XPRIZE and funded almost entirely by philanthropists led by billionaire Morris Kahn. Total cost, including launch: about 100 million dollars. Israel was minutes from becoming the fourth country ever to soft-land on the Moon.

The journey there had been a masterpiece of thrift. Launched on 22 February 2019 as a rideshare passenger on a Falcon 9, the 585-kilogram lander could not fly straight to the Moon. Instead it spent six weeks looping through ever-widening Earth orbits before slipping into lunar orbit on 4 April, making Israel the seventh nation to orbit the Moon and Beresheet the smallest spacecraft ever to do so at the time.

Then, during the braking burn, one of the lander's inertial measurement units failed. The command sent to recover it triggered a cascade that shut down the main engine. By the time engineers restarted it, Beresheet was falling too fast to save. Telemetry froze, and the spacecraft struck Mare Serenitatis at high speed, leaving a dark smudge that NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter photographed eleven days later.

Yet the mood that night was closer to pride than despair. Beresheet had flown to the Moon for a fraction of any government mission's budget, and the XPRIZE Foundation awarded SpaceIL a one-million-dollar Moonshot Award anyway. Five years later, when a private American lander finally touched down intact, it was walking a trail Beresheet had blazed.