SpaceIL
Yesterday, SpaceIL president Morris Kahn tweeted the video below where he announced that Israel will build another lander, dubbed Beresheet 2.0, to finish what its predecessor was unable to do last Thursday. A targeted launch date obviously wasn't given, as the SpaceIL team met today to discuss preliminary details for the new project.
The dream goes on! Morris Kahn just announced the launching of Beresheet 2.0 #Beresheet2.0 #IsraeltotheMoon pic.twitter.com/fHlo3jeQ4W
— Israel To The Moon (@TeamSpaceIL) April 13, 2019
All I can say is, this is great news! Keep in mind that it took NASA seven tries for it to successfully reach the Moon in the early 1960s (Ranger 7 got to the Moon and intentionally impacted the lunar surface on July 31, 1964). Assuming that Beresheet 2.0 gets the necessary upgrades to give it a better chance of mission success over the first Beresheet lander (more redundancy in its systems, star trackers that aren't affected by glaring sunlight, and perhaps a different and more reliable main engine), then Israel should be back on course to become the fourth nation (behind the United States, Russia and China) to soft-land a robotic spacecraft on the lunar landscape.
SpaceIL
I'm tempted towards eventually tweeting to SpaceIL (like I did last year, as shown below) and asking it to allow the general public (besides the good folks of Israel) to submit their names online and have them fly on Beresheet 2.0 when it makes its triumphant journey onto the surface of Earth's closest celestial neighbor! Carry on.
Note to @TeamSpaceIL, if you allow folks around the world to submit their names [via the Internet, like what @NASA & Japan (@JAXA_en) occasionally do] to fly aboard the #SpaceIL lander to the lunar surface next year, that'd be TOTALLY awesome!
— Richard Par (@RichTPar) July 10, 2018
Just a suggestion. :) #SpaceX #Moon https://t.co/TtF7F8ndWk
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