JERUSALEM (JTA) \u2014 The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed while attempting to land on the surface of the moon.<\/p>\n
Israel\u2019s Beresheet spacecraft took this \u201cselfie\u201d as it attempted to land on the moon. (SpaceIL\/YouTube)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIf at first you don\u2019t succeed, try again,\u201d Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said from SpaceIL\u2019s control room in Yehud, in central Israel, on Thursday. He vowed that Israel would attempt the moon landing again in the future.<\/p>\n
The spacecraft lost power in its main engine after sending a selfie from 22 kilometers (nearly 14 miles) above the surface of the moon, then went into a free fall toward the surface. The main engine reignited several kilometers above the surface before losing communication with the control room.<\/p>\n
At least 95,000 viewers tuned in to a live broadcast of the control room on YouTube, and the hundreds of chat messages a minute indicated that they were watching from throughout Israel, the United States and several other countries. Beresheet means Genesis in Hebrew.<\/p>\n
About 200 children and parents gathered at President\u2019s Reuven Rivlin\u2019s residence in Jerusalem to watch the landing.<\/p>\n
Although it didn\u2019t complete its mission, Beresheet helped Israel become the seventh country to have a spacecraft orbit the moon.<\/p>\n
To view the entire landing, here is the live feed from YouTube<\/p>\n
<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe don\u2019t have to be disappointed. We should congratulate ourselves on what we have achieved,\u201d Rivlin said.<\/p>\n<p>Later he added, \u201cSure we didn\u2019t land exactly like we wanted, but we landed. We are on the moon!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The control room and its spectators, as well as Rivlin and his guests, sang Israel\u2019s national anthem, \u201cHatikvah,\u201d together following the crash.<\/p>\n<p>Morris Kahn, the major funder of the SpaceIL project, said afterward that the control room confirmed that the landing had failed.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_48238\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Netanyahu_SpaceIL.png\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-48238\" class=\"wp-image-48238 size-medium lazyload\" data-src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Netanyahu_SpaceIL-300x219.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"219\" data-srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Netanyahu_SpaceIL-300x219.png 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Netanyahu_SpaceIL.png 476w\" data-sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" style=\"--smush-placeholder-width: 300px; --smush-placeholder-aspect-ratio: 300\/219;\" \/><noscript><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-48238\" class=\"wp-image-48238 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Netanyahu_SpaceIL-300x219.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"219\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Netanyahu_SpaceIL-300x219.png 300w, https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/Netanyahu_SpaceIL.png 476w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/noscript><\/a><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-48238\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in control room for Space IL. (Photo via YouTube)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>\u201cWell, we didn\u2019t make it, but we definitely tried,\u201d he said. \u201cI think the achievement of the attempt is really tremendous.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The size of a compact car, the craft weighed about 1,300 pounds at launch, most of which was fuel. It took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Feb. 21 aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It used the gravity of the earth and then the moon to make its way to the lunar surface, traveling over 3.4 million miles in its orbits around the earth and another 1 million around the moon.<\/p>\n<p>The craft\u2019s landing time was listed Thursday on the electronic arrivals timetable board at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv alongside other flights.<\/p>\n<p>Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, entered the control room moments before the scheduled landing and greeted the scientists and technicians. They took their seats in the front row of the viewing room outside of the control room. SpaceIL co-founders Yonatan Winetraub, Kfir Damari and Yariv Bash also sat together in the front row.<\/p>\n<p>Before the landing attempt, the SpaceIL team remembered Ilan Ramon, Israel\u2019s first astronaut, who died in 2003 aboard Columbia when the space shuttle exploded during re-entry.<\/p>\n<div style=\"padding-bottom:20px; padding-top:10px;\" class=\"hupso-share-buttons\"><!-- Hupso Share Buttons - https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/ --><a class=\"hupso_toolbar\" href=\"https:\/\/www.hupso.com\/share\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" data-src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\" src=\"data:image\/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==\" class=\"lazyload\" \/><noscript><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\" style=\"border:0px; padding-top: 5px; float:left;\" alt=\"Share Button\"\/><\/noscript><\/a><script type=\"text\/javascript\">var hupso_services_t=new Array(\"Twitter\",\"Facebook\",\"Google Plus\",\"Pinterest\",\"Linkedin\",\"Tumblr\",\"Email\");var hupso_background_t=\"#EAF4FF\";var hupso_border_t=\"#66CCFF\";var hupso_toolbar_size_t=\"medium\";var hupso_image_folder_url = \"\";var hupso_url_t=\"\";var hupso_title_t=\"Israeli%20spacecraft%20crashes%20in%20moon%20landing%20attempt\";<\/script><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/js\/share_toolbar.js\"><\/script><!-- Hupso Share Buttons --><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":48236,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[208,9896,8781,8790,9481,8788,9875],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48235"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48235"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48242,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48235\/revisions\/48242"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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