Israeli spacecraft gets final element before 2019 moon launch
Tel Aviv — Israeli engineers have added the final element to a spacecraft destined for the moon — a digital time capsule — and say they aim to land the craft early in 2019, somewhere between the landing sites of Apollo 15 and 17. It will be the first mission of its kind since 2013 and, if it is successful, Israel will be the fourth country to carry out a controlled “soft” landing of an unmanned vessel on the moon. Since 1966, the US and the former Soviet Union have put about a dozen of them on the moon and China last did so in 2013. “The spacecraft is completely built, tested … and will be ready to ship to Cape Canaveral in a few weeks,” said Ido Anteby, CEO of the SpaceIL non-profit that has led the project. Israel has launched satellites before, but this is the first longer-range Israeli spacecraft of its kind. The craft, called Beresheet, Hebrew for Genesis, is shaped like a round table with four carbon-fibre legs, stands about 1.5m tall and weighs 585kg, with fuel accounting for...
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