Israel releases its first lunar lander into space from Florida

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has blasted off from Florida carrying Israel’s first lunar lander on a mission that if successful will make the country only the fourth nation to ever to achieve a controlled touchdown on the moon’s surface.

The unmanned robotic lander dubbed Beresheet – Hebrew for the biblical phrase “in the beginning” – soared into space from the Cape Canaveral air force station on Thursday night local time on top of a nearly 100m (328ft) tall rocket, The Guardian reports.

Beresheet, about the size of a dishwashing machine, was one of three sets of cargo carried by the Falcon 9, part of the private rocket fleet of billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s California-based company SpaceX.

The rocket’s two other payloads were a telecommunications satellite for Indonesia and an experimental satellite for the US air force.

Beresheet was jettisoned into Earth orbit about 34 minutes after launch, followed 15 minutes later by the release of the two satellites, according to a SpaceX webcast of the event.

In addition to a textbook launch and payload deployments, SpaceX also managed to recycle its own rockets. Just minutes after blastoff, the Falcon 9’s nine-engine suborbital main-stage booster separated from the upper stage, flew back to Earth and landed safely on a drone ship floating in the Atlantic ocean more than 480km (300 miles off the Florida coast.

As seen from the launch site, the distant glow of the returning booster rocket was visible in the sky just as the moon appeared over the horizon. The spectacle drew cheers from mission control engineers.