Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Meet The Guys Who Sent Israel’s First Spacecraft To The Moon

[Yariv Bash](=https://forward.com/schmooze/419784/israel-aims-to-send-a-space-craft-to-the-moon-thursday-night/ wasn’t supposed to go to the moon. He wasn’t supposed to go anywhere.

Just two years before the 39-year-old electronic engineer made history on Thursday, bringing an Israeli spacecraft to the moon, he was injured so severely in a skiing accident that he was paralyzed from the waist down. “No worries,” he told his friends at the time. “First, we’ll put a spacecraft on the moon. Then, we’ll fix my legs.”

Bash, Kfir Damari and Yonatan Winetraub, together the founders of Israeli non-profit SpaceIL, consider themselves “proud geeks.” Drinking at bars in Tel Aviv, they wondered, “Why not get to the moon?” Determined to make their country the fourth ever to land a space craft on the moon, they worked since 2011 to build, fund, launch, and land “Beresheet,” with funding from Israel Aerospace Industries, and private donations from South African-Israeli entrepreneur Morris Kahn, Canadian-Israeli real estate mogul Sylvan Adams and American casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.

Sound fancy? Beresheet is the least costly spacecraft in history to make it to the moon, at $100 million.

But on Thursday, Beresheet crashed. After a mostly smooth two-month journey, as the spacecraft was just ten kilometers from the surface of the moon, the spacecraft suffered an engine malfunction and went into an uncontrolled descent, crashing on the moon’s surface.

“We’re on the moon, just not how we wanted,” came a message from the Beresheet control room.

It may be a small step for man, but it’s a pretty big leap for Israel — the first privately funded spacecraft to ever reach the moon, the fourth in general, the cheapest, and, of course, the only one created all by Jewish scientists.

Plus, we think Bash, Damari, and Winetraub may be able to shake this disappointment off. The three men are all still in their 30s. Damari is co-founder of Metapacket, a high-tech security firm for corporations.

Winetraub, who has trained with NASA, helped SpaceIL develop an educational program that has reached 1 million children. “We live in an era when these kids are going to be able to make their own rocket ships, or solve global warming, or clean up the oceans or whatever it is that they want to do,” he told From the Grapevine. He’s determined for the technology “to catch up with their dreams.” Oh, also, he’s getting a PhD at Stanford, working on a method for earlier cancer detection.

And Bash? Bash is the CEO of Flytrex, which he hopes to use “to make drone delivery ‘as easy as using your iPhone.’”

The three men aren’t too defeated. As they like to say, “Apparently, it is rocket science.”

Watch Nas Daily tell the story of Beresheet:

Jenny Singer is the deputy life/features editor for the Forward. You can reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

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

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.