Sheldon Adelson Gives $16M To Send Israel to the Moon
Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife have pledged $16.4 million to fund the Israeli SpaceIL mission to the moon.
The donation by the American Jewish couple’s Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Family Foundation was reported Thursday on the Israeli news site on science, hayadan.org.il.
“Sheldon and I are thrilled to be supporting the SpaceIL association in its effort to land the first Israel spacecraft on the moon,” Miriam Adelson was quoted as saying. “As a physician and an Israel-born scientist, I am particularly proud of the positive effect this will have on a generation of young Israelis and non-Israelis,” she said.
With 20 full-time staff and 250 volunteers, the SpaceIL project aims to land a spacecraft on the moon at a cost of approximately $37 million.
The Adelson donation means the program has the necessary budget to push ahead with the mission, SpaceIL’s fundraising and development head Daniel Saat told the London Jewish Chronicle.
SpaceIL is taking part in the Google Lunar X competition launched in 2007 and is the only team running its project through philanthropic donations rather than corporate sponsorship, according to the Chronicle.
Yariv Bash, one of the co-founders of SpaceIL, said that once the craft makes it to the lunar surface, he hopes it will also carry out a number of groundbreaking experiments including the first attempt to grow plants outside the earth.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
