Israel's SpaceIL satellite to reach moon in 2017

SpaceIL
SpaceIL

SpaceIL is competing for a $20 million prize from Google for landing on the moon.

SpaceIL's unmanned Israeli satellite, a cooperative effort with Elon Musk, today took a big stride on its way to the moon. At a press conference today at the President's Residence, SpaceIL, a non-profit organization, announced the signing of a launch contract that will reserve a place for its satellite on US outer space corporation's SpaceX's huge rocket scheduled for takeoff in 2017. Musk, who also leads Tesla Motors, is the founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX.

The cost of participating in the launch is over $10 million. It was raised from SpaceIL's two main donors: the Kahn Foundation and the family foundation of Dr. Miriam and Sheldon Adelson. The launch will increase the chances of the Israeli representative of winning the Google Lunar XPRIZE international competition, which offers $20 million to a private group reaching the moon, making a soft landing on it, moving 500 meters on the surface, and sending high-resolution video images to earth.

Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari, and Yonatan Winetraub founded SpaceIL in 2011 to make the first Israeli landing on the moon. SpaceIL has announced that if it wins the competition, it will donate the prize money to Israeli science and scientific and technological education in Israel.

Entrepreneur Yanki Margalit, the chairman of SpaceIL, said that the signing moves Israel closer to what was once the exclusive reserve of the three superpowers: the US, the USSR, and China. Margalit said that the Israeli representative, the last to register for the competition, had an advantage. SpaceIL CEO Dr. Eran Privman explained that SpaceIL's unique engineering solution would enable it to lower the launching costs substantially by using only one specific compartment on the launcher, in contrast to the heavy space vehicles used by the other representatives.

Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on October 7, 2015

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2015

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