SpaceIL landing on moon to be telecast tomorrow

Vijayawada: Since the dawn of the Space Age only three countries have landed their craft on the moon--the U.S., the Soviet Union and China. Now, in 2019, for the first time, a private technology company attempted to join that list.

In a one-hour Discovery Exclusive special, 'Return to the moon: seconds to arrival', premiering on Monday at 10 pm, the Discovery Channel will follow the men and women of SpaceIL on its mission to land the first privately funded spacecraft on the surface of moon.

The show will also be simulcast on Discovery HD World, Discovery Science. SpaceIL was founded by three young Israeli engineers, Yariv Bash, Kfir Damari, and Yonatan Winetraub, and is one of the organisations that participated in the international Google Lunar XPRIZE, which challenged scientists to build, launch, and land an unmanned spacecraft on the moon.

In 2017, SpaceIL, the lone representative from Israel, became one of the five finalists, but in 2018, Google closed the contest without naming a winner. Undeterred, SpaceIL soldiered on with help of public and private funding.

Their attempted lunar landing was the culmination of eight years of intensive collaboration between SpaceIL and Israeli Aerospace Industries. The craft, which could have been the smallest ever to land on the moon, launched as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a two-month journey.