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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Well, we didn't make it but we definitely tried and I think the achievement of getting to where we got is really tremendous.
Morris Kahn · SpaceIL chairman and principal funder
By the numbers
Launch
22 Feb 2019, Falcon 9 rideshare from Cape Canaveral
Launch mass
585 kg (~150 kg dry)
Lunar orbit insertion
4 Apr 2019
Impact
11 Apr 2019, Mare Serenitatis
Mission cost
~US$100 million, privately funded
Operator
SpaceIL / Israel Aerospace Industries
Why it mattered
Beresheet failed in its final minute, but it shattered the assumption that lunar missions belonged only to superpowers. For roughly $100 million, a nonprofit and a national aerospace contractor reached lunar orbit and very nearly the surface, making Israel the seventh nation to orbit the Moon. The mission directly energized the commercial lunar lander industry, validating the low-cost philosophy behind NASA's CLPS program and the wave of private landers that followed in the 2020s.
▸Beresheet was the first privately funded spacecraft ever to orbit the Moon, and the smallest to do so at the time, reaching it as a hitchhiking secondary payload.
▸It carried the Arch Mission Foundation's 'Lunar Library,' a 30-million-page archive of human knowledge on nickel discs, plus thousands of dehydrated tardigrades whose fate sparked a planetary-protection debate.
▸During the flight it photographed itself above the Moon holding a placard reading 'Small country, big dreams.'
▸NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found the crash site on 22 April 2019: a dark, elongated smudge on the rim of a small crater.
▸Despite the crash, the XPRIZE Foundation awarded SpaceIL a $1 million 'Moonshot Award' for reaching the lunar surface at all.
