[DAWN] The aerospace company behind Israel's failed first moonshot said on Saturday it would pursue a second mission with funds raised from private donors and the public.
The robot craft Beresheet, built by non-profit SpaceIL and state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), crashed on its final descent on Thursday, dashing Israel's hope of becoming the fourth country to manage a controlled lunar landing.
"I have had time to think, over the weekend, about what happened, and given all of the encouragement I got, and the support from people all over the world I have come tonight to announce a new project ‐ Beresheet 2," SpaceIL president and high-tech billionaire Morris Kahn told Israel's Channel 12 TV.
The maiden mission cost about $100 million, most of it raised from private donors like Kahn. He said in the interview that Israeli government participation amounted to about $3 million.
Private donors were already pledging funds for the new project, Kahn said, but he added that money should come from the public for "a project of the people of Israel".
Following Kahn’s announcement, Israel Aerospace Industries, which partnered on Beresheet, said it would gladly take part in future SpaceIL ventures.
Kahn provided a large chunk of the $100 million (NIS 370 million) required to build and launch the spacecraft ‐ a novel approach that came at a fraction of the cost of previous, state-funded efforts to land on the moon.
The project was a joint venture between the Israeli nonprofit SpaceIL and Israel Aerospace Industries, funded almost entirely by private donations from well-known Jewish philanthropists, including Kahn, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, Lynn Schusterman, and others.
SpaceIL co-founder Yariv Bash said it would take about two or three years to get another prototype ready for a moon landing.
Opher Doron, the general manager of the Israel Aerospace Industries’ space division, which collaborated on building the spacecraft, said engineers were still studying the problem that led to the crash. Currently, they believe there had been a failure with one of the telemetry (altitude) measurement units, which caused a chain of events that ended up cutting the main engine about 10 kilometers (6 miles) above the moon’s surface. Without the main engine, the spacecraft could not properly brake in time to make a gentle landing, instead crashing into the moon Thursday.
SpaceIL co-founder Yonatan Winetraub said in a presser after the crash: "We didn’t reach the moon in one piece. That sucks. However,
if you can't say something nice about a person some juicy gossip will go well...
engineering and science are hard. Sometimes it doesn’t work the first time, sometimes it doesn’t work the second or third time. But it will work." 
|
