H.E. Job Masima was excited to meet with Mr. Kfir Damari, one of the co-founders of SpaceIL and had a very cordial and stimulating interchange. He heartily compliments SpaceIL organization for their uplifting experience and strongly encourages them completing their second attempt, Beresheet-2.
SpaceIL is an Israeli organization, established in 2011, that was competing in the Google Lunar X Prize (GLXP) contest to land a spacecraft on the Moon.
SpaceIL successfully launched its Beresheet lander on 22 February 2019 at 01:45 UTC; it entered lunar orbit on 4 April 2019 at 14:18 UTC.
On 11 April 2019, during the landing procedure, a problem occurred in the final minutes of flight.
Beresheet was the first Israeli spacecraft to travel beyond Earth’s orbit and was the first privately funded landing on the Moon.
Though the spacecraft crashed, Israel became the seventh country to make lunar orbit and the fourth country, after the Soviet Union, the United States, and China to attempt a soft landing on the Moon.
The cofounders of the team are Yariv Bash, electronics and computer engineer; Kfir Damari, a Computer Networking lecturer and entrepreneur; and Yonatan Winetraub, a satellite systems engineer and currently a biophysics PhD candidate. Morris Kahn is the chairman of the public board.