Israeli probe crashes in attempt to become first privately-funded moon lander

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, according to The Telegraph.

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.”