Sunday, April 14, 2019

Beresheet Will Fly Again!

A selfie that Israel's Beresheet lunar lander took while it was only 14 miles (22 kilometers) above the Moon's surface...on April 11, 2019.
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.


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.

An artist's concept of the Beresheet lunar lander on the surface of the Moon.
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.

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