Shares An artist's depiction of the Beresheet lander on the moon's surface.
Some nights, the moon may look close enough to touch , but only a handful of teams have succeeded in reaching the lunar surface. The USSR did it in 1966 and the U.S. followed just four months later. China pulled it off in 2013 and again just recently , in January 2019. And this April, if all goes according to plan, an Israeli nonprofit organization called SpaceIL will be the next entity to land a spacecraft on the surface of the moon.
SpaceIL's lunar lander, Beresheet, launched from Cape Canaveral on a used SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Feb. 21, 2019, along with an Indonesian communications satellite and a U.S. Air Force satellite. Over nearly two months, the craft will boost itself into successively longer loops around the planet until reaches the moon. Beresheet carries a time capsule of digital records and an instrument to study the moon's magnetic field. If the spacecraft touches down safely, it will mark the first moon landing for Israel and the first for a privately funded organization from anywhere.