(solemn piano music)
It has never been done before.
A private company has launched a spacecraft to the moon.
It is descending,
and is less than 20 miles from the lunar surface.
We're about to start the landing process.
We're going to orientate the spacecraft
in the right direction.
We're now about 850 kilometers from our landing site.
We're at an altitude of 25 kilometers.
SpaceIL is guiding its lunar lander
from this mission control room in Tel Aviv.
Founder Yonatan Winetraub is hoping
this will be a decade-old dream come true.
So, the spacecraft's name is called Beresheet,
which means "in the beginning" in Hebrew.
It's also Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
This is the first spacecraft of its kind.
It's the first private interplanetary mission.
The entire project is the cheapest space mission ever built.
It's a hundred million dollars
and that's comparing to billions of dollars
that it cost space agencies to put something on the moon.
(upbeat music)
We will start firing the main engine
to start breaking the spacecraft.
We have a few seconds at the beginning of the process,
where the spacecraft will decide by itself
if everything is OK.
If not, it aborts the landing and continues in its orbit.
Beresheet is less than
ten minutes from reaching its goal.
The scientists and engineers who've built the spacecraft
brace for landing.
The difficult part about spacecraft is that
you build it here on Earth,
and it needs to functions out there on the moon.
And Earth is very different than the moon.
Gravity is different, air resistance,
all the radiation problems, it's very, very different.
So, a lot of times you're just guessing.
Space is very cold, but the side
that is facing the sun is very hot.
The contrast between very hot when
the sun is pointing towards you,
to very cold when you're in the shade,
and you need to test it and there are ways to do that.
Israel has been branded the startup nation.
It is in the top ten of high-tech
startup countries worldwide.
Many of the winner ideas have
been conceived in Tel Aviv bars.
That is where space engineer Yonatan Winetraub,
along with his two friends, Kfir Damari and Yariv Bash,
spawned the bold idea of privately
launching a spacecraft to the moon.
So, we started working, making the plans,
and from the very beginning, it was very clear
the way to reduce cost would be to make a small spacecraft.
And this guy comes to us and says, "Do you have any money?"
And I remember I'm looking at Yariv, Yariv's looking at me,
and we're not sure what to say to this,
because we just got started, I barely owned a car back then.
And we said, "No, we just got started."
And he says, "Come to my office,
I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars."
And that person was Morris Khan.
This was a great idea.
And I asked them, "Do you have any money?"
And the three of them looked at each other
and they said, "Money?
"What's that?"
Morris Khan is an
Israeli high-tech billionaire.
His initial one hundred thousand dollar contribution
ballooned to nearly forty-five million dollars,
almost half of the budget.
And I began to become aware
of what the potential is for this project.
You've actually got several very wealthy people
who're involved right now in developing
the possibility of space travel.
Elon Musk is planning to go to Mars.
I'm not sure that actually we're ready
to settle on other planets.
But it'll come. It'll come.
Beresheet is just six minutes from landing.
It took eight years, numerous designs,
and manufacture modifications,
to get the spacecraft to the right ratio of fuel to weight,
keep the vehicle light, and cost effective.
Last January, Beresheet was packed
and flown for launch to Cape Canaveral.
It's a big moment.
We are really excited.
We are sure that you are also.
So one thing we always do at every event
is we take a selfie.
Three, two, one!
To the moon!
(inspirational music)
We got it to space by using a Falcon 9 rocket
and we ride-share it, so we had another
communication satellite that we were just on top.
So we were riding a shotgun ride on the Falcon 9 rocket.
( audience cheers) (inspirational music)
There on your screen you can see
the second-stage engine has lit
with gorgeous red-orange glow of that nozzle.
There you can see on your screen
visual confirmation of deployment
for the Nusantara Satellite.
And it deployed us to a high Earth orbit
and we started our mission from there.
The ingenuity in SpaceIL's design
is that each time the spacecraft orbited the Earth,
it would briefly fire it's main engines,
sling-shooting Beresheet into a further orbit
out into space until it finally intersected
with the moon's orbit of the Earth.
(inspiring piano music)
When NASA launches to the moon,
they usually have a dedicated rocket
that basically fires the engine,
and puts the spacecraft in trajectory towards the moon.
That is a very simple, straightforward,
takes four days to get to the moon.
We couldn't afford that,
because we couldn't afford a full rocket.
We went around the Earth many, many times
until the moon came in the right position
and we captured with it.
And that journey took six and a half billion kilometers
or four million miles to do.
So, we were waiting to the right moment
and then the spacecraft fired an engine
and started going around the moon.
This is a very delicate, complicated procedure.
It's like dropping a pin out of the fourth floor
and hitting an eye of the needle.
And that is extremely difficult.
And we were able to capture with the moon on the first try.
And the spacecraft orbited around the moon.
This was something that no private organization
had done before.
We are in the breaking process.
The breaking process is working well.
We can see the spacecraft slowing down.
Now the challenge is we need
to lower the orbit and make it tighter and tighter
to prepare for the landing.
And in the final loops, we were just
ten miles above the surface.
And that is scary low.
Because at seven, you have mountains.
Because the spacecraft is so far away,
we don't have a joystick here on Earth
to say, "Oh, we see some rocks, go left or go right."
Because by the time the radio signals
traveling at the speed of light go back and forth,
we already missed couple of seconds.
We're coming in at the speed of faster than a bullet
towards the surface of the moon.
We have to slow it down on rockets.
If the engine shuts down abruptly,
in the middle of the landing,
we're for sure to crash into the moon
The spacecraft is just
a few minutes from touchdown.
If something goes wrong,
it is past the abort landing option.
We have passed the point of no return,
we are in the landing process.
The spacecraft is now pointing at
about fifteen degrees to the horizon.
So, this wonderful selfie picture
from an altitude of about 22 kilometers
is on the background of the moon
as we are approaching the landing site.
(suspenseful music)
We seem to have a problem with our main engine.
We are resetting the spacecraft, try to enable the engine.
(suspenseful music)
We have the main engine back on.
The main engine is back on,
but we have lost communication with the spacecraft.
We had a failure in the spacecraft, we unfortunately have
not managed to land successfully.
At just several miles above the moon,
an errant computer command shut off the main engine.
It took several seconds to restart the burn,
but it was too late.
The spacecraft slammed into the lunar surface
at a speed of a thousand meters per second.
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.
I think we can be proud.
(applause)
If at first you don't succeed, you try again.
(foreign language)
For those who built Beresheet,
the mission was a successful failure.
It was a bittersweet celebration.
We took a first step in bringing the cost down
and making space affordable for non-government agencies
and I hope that others would build on that
and then continue it forward.
Here we were on a shoestring budget,
privately funded and trying to do
something that hasn't been done before.
So, it represents a new paradigm of space exploration.
I think it's all about the journey.
Look, in the bar?
I could never imagine we would get to that point
where we have a lander that actually got to the moon.
And we have a nation that is cheering for the next mission.
But you gotta start from somewhere
if you want to get to the moon.
And I think this is the greatest journey I've ever been on.
We need to try again.
And this is why I'm so happy that we're gonna do
a Beresheet number two to finish the job.
(inspirational music)