Destination moon: SpaceX rocket carrying Israeli spacecraft lifts off

A SpaceX rocket took off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on Thursday night carrying an Israeli spacecraft, which aims to make history twice: as the first private-sector landing on the moon, and the first from the Jewish state.

The start of the flight went smoothly, with the first stage entry burn completed uneventfully less than three minutes after lift-off.

The unmanned robotic lander dubbed Beresheet – Hebrew for the biblical phrase “in the beginning” – blasted off at 8:45pm (0145 GMT on Friday) on a Falcon 9 rocket launched by California-based entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX company from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

If all goes according to plan, Beresheet, about the size of a dishwasher, will arrive on the nearside of the moon in mid-April following a two-month journey through 6.5 million km (4 million miles) of space. A flight path directly from the Earth to the moon would cover roughly 386,242km (240,000 miles).

After launch, the spacecraft was to enter a gradually widening Earth orbit that would eventually bring the probe within the moon’s gravitational pull, setting the stage for a series of additional manoeuvres leading to an automated touchdown.

Beresheet is one of three payloads to be carried aloft by the SpaceX rocket. The two others are a telecommunications satellite for Indonesia and an experimental satellite for the US Air Force.

So far, only three other nations have carried out controlled “soft” landings on the moon – the United States, the former Soviet Union and China.

Spacecraft from several countries, including India’s Moon Impact Probe, Japan’s SELENE orbiter and a European Space Agency orbital probe called SMART 1, have intentionally crashed on the lunar surface.

The US Apollo programme tallied six manned missions to the moon – the only ones yet achieved – between 1969 and 1972, with about a dozen more robotic landings combined by the United States and Soviets. China made history in January with its Chang’e 4, the first to touch down on the dark side of the moon.

Beresheet would mark the first non-government lunar landing. The 585kg (1,290-pound) spacecraft was built by Israeli charity space venture SpaceIL and state-owned defence contractor Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) with US$100 million furnished almost entirely by private donors.

SpaceIL officials have said they hope Beresheet will help inspire Israel’s defence-focused space programme to pursue more science-oriented missions.

Beresheet is designed to spend just two to three days using on-board instruments to photograph its landing site and measure the moon’s magnetic field. Data will be relayed via the US space agency Nasa’s Deep Space Network to SpaceIL’s Israel-based ground station Yehud.

A series of future moon landings has already been jointly planned by IAI and German’s OHB System on behalf of the European Space Agency.

Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse